Target-aware distributed coverage and connectivity algorithm for wireless sensor networks

One of the wireless sensor networks applications is to sense a discrete set of targets lying on the field and maintain connectivity with the sink for data transmission. In addition, it needs to minimize energy consumption to maximize the coverage lifetime. One such solution for coverage maximization is to group sensor nodes into cover sets. Each cover set remains active at a time to keep track of all the targets in the field until one of its active nodes depletes energy completely. Therefore, maximizing the number of cover sets and enhancing each set's coverage lifetime is a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a new energy-aware algorithm for the coverage and connectivity of the sensor nodes. In the algorithm, we devise an energy-efficient strategy to maximize the number of cover sets and energy-aware connectivity. Extensive simulation runs show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing ones.