Using adaptive sensor ranking to reduce the overhead of the coverage configuration protocol

Several application scenarios of wireless sensor networks require coverage of a given region of interest to be guaranteed. In order to establish a coverage preserving configuration, sensor nodes must coordinate and thus invest precious energy resources for both computation and communication. Reducing this overhead is particularly important in applications requiring frequent recomputations of the coverage configuration. In this paper, we focus on these applications and on a particularly efficient coverage configuration protocol, known as CCP. By introducing a novel adaptive sensor ranking technique, we enable CCP to perform a timely selection of the nodes whose activation guarantees for the fulfillment of the coverage requirement. Simulation results show that our approach achieves a 10% reduction of the communication overhead of CCP.