Demand-Based Coverage and Connectivity-Preserving Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

An important issue of research in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with dense and random deployment of sensors is to minimize the energy consumption while ensuring the desired coverage of the field of interest and connectivity of the network. In this paper, we present a demand-based coverage and connectivity-preserving routing protocol to provide desired coverage and connectivity requirements in WSNs. The protocol reduces the energy consumption by assigning the minimum required sensing range to the sensors and using a scheduling protocol to periodically turn off the communication radios of the sensors in a coordinated manner and a local route optimization with a power control technique. The proposed protocol is fully distributed and does not use any geographical information. Our simulations show that the proposed protocol effectively maintains the desired coverage and connectivity of the network and prolongs the network lifetime.