Error-Tolerant Coverage Control based on Bio-inspired Attractor Selection Model for Wireless Sensor Networks

A coverage problem is one of major issues of a wireless sensor network to prolong the lifetime while guaranteeing that the target region and objects are monitored by sufficient number of active nodes. There have been many proposals on the coverage problem, but most of them use geometric algorithms in order to determine whether to monitor around or sleep. As such, these algorithms require information about the location, sensing area, and sensing state of neighbor nodes. In addition, they suffer from localization error leading to degradation of coverage and redundancy of active nodes. In this paper, we propose a coverage control mechanism where each sensor node relies only on the information about the degree of coverage of the target region. To enable autonomous decision of sensor nodes, we adopt a nonlinear mathematical model called the attractor selection model of adaptive behavior of biological systems to dynamically changing environment. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that the proposal outperforms the existing protocol regarding the per-node coverage and the overhead under influece of localization error.