Network Lifetime Maximization for Full Area Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor scheduling for maximizing the network lifetime and achieving the full area coverage is a paramount problem in wireless sensor networks. Although considerable effort has been devoted, this problem is still a challenge to the research community. The approximation algorithms proposed so far couldn't guarantee the performance ratio. In this paper, we first formulate the problem under linear programming model which can help to determine the exact optimal solution. Then, in order to reduce the time complexity, we propose a (1 +∊)-approximation algorithm based on divide-and-conquer technique. The main idea is to divide the network into sub-regions, then determine the suboptimal solution for every sub-region and combine them to obtain the total solution of the whole network. Moreover, with the aim of speeding up the suboptimal solution finding process, we propose an approximation algorithm using the column generation approach. The experiment results show the superiority of our proposed algorithms over the existing ones.