On the Cover Scheduling Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks

Cover scheduling for wireless sensor networks has attracted a lot of attention during the last decade. Many heuristic approaches and exact methods have been proposed for producing covers, i.e. subsets of sensors to be used at the same time. However, the actual schedule of the generated covers has never been explicitly addressed to the best of our knowledge. Though, this problem is of particular relevance when coverage breach is allowed in the aforementioned problems, i.e., when a full coverage of targets at any time is not mandatory. In that case, the objective of the wireless sensor network cover scheduling problem (WSN-CSP) is to schedule the covers so as to minimize the longest period of time during which a target is not covered in the schedule. In this paper, this problem is proved NP-Hard, a MILP formulation is provided along with a greedy heuristic and a genetic algorithm based approach. Computational results show the effectiveness of the last approach.