Energy and Coverage-Aware Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the objectives of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to preserve the coverage of the target area by the sensor nodes to a maximum possible time. Therefore, designing energy efficient algorithm to maximize the coverage lifetime is a central problem to a large-scale WSN. In this paper, we propose a new distributed, energy and coverage aware routing algorithm called DECAR to achieve this goal. In the proposed algorithm, sensor nodes are grouped into clusters of unequal size to minimize the hot spot problem during the process of data routing towards sink. We devise a simple and elegant method for selecting next hop cluster heads (CHs) to relay the aggregated data by considering the overlapping of their sensing areas. In addition to this, the proposed method tries to balance the relaying load of the CHs in order to equalize their energy consumption. Simulation results show that the proposed DECAR algorithm achieves better coverage lifetime than the existing approaches.