Energy-Efficient Node Scheduling for Dense Wireless Sensor Networks Using Voronoi Diagram

A wireless sensor network consists of distributed devices which can monitor physical and environmental conditions and have a lot of applications, such as environmental monitoring, habitat monitoring, object tracking, nuclear reactor controlling, fire detection and traffic monitoring. Although it has a lot of potential applications, a wireless sensor network is highly energy constrained. Limited energy resource to the sensor becomes an obstacle for its applications and efficient usage of energy helps in improving the network lifetime. Suppose a network has a high-density of sensor nodes, there will be lots of problems such as the intersection of sensing, redundant data, communication interference and energy waste. So it is necessary to set up a management application to maintain these resources. On the other hand, a high-density network can be fault tolerant and more accurate than low-density sensor networks. In this paper, we proposed a new scheduling for sensor networks which can decide the nodes to be on or off and maintain the coverage area for the original one. This management schema may take a node out of service temporally in order to save energy. Our design uses a Voronoi Diagram, which decomposes the sensing area into regions around each node.