An Enhanced Sensor Scheduling Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

An important design challenge in wireless sensor network application development is to provide appropriate middleware service protocols to control the energy consumption according to specific application scenarios. In common application scenarios such as in surveillance systems, it is usually necessary to extend the system monitoring area as large as possible to cover the maximal area. The two issues of power conservation and maximizing the coverage area have to be considered together with both the sensors´ communication connectivity and their power management strategy. In this work, we proposed an enhanced sensor scheduling protocol to address the application scenario of typical surveillance systems. Our protocol takes into consideration of both power conservation and coverage ratio to search for the balance between the different requirements. We proposed both centralized and de-centralized versions of sensor scheduling protocol, and compared the performance of different protocols using several metrics. The results provide evidence of the advantages of the proposed protocol compared with existing sensor scheduling protocols.