Maximizing network lifetime for target coverage problem in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

This paper presents an energy-efficient distributed target coverage algorithm(EDTC) for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks(HWSN) with multiple sensing units. In order to utilize the energy more efficiently, the sensor priority is introduced in this paper to integrate the sensing ability and the remaining energy together. EDTC is locally and simultaneously carried out at each sensor in a rounding fashion. Each sensor decides the on/off status of its sensing units at the beginning of each round, and then broadcasts the decision to its one-hop neighbors. The higher the priority of a sensor is, the shorter the decision time it needs. Simulation results show that compared with Energy First(EF) scheme and Integer Linear Programming(ILP) solution, EDTC has longer network lifetime than EF, and the performance difference between EDTC and ILP solution is confined within 10%.