Energy-efficient continuous and event-driven monitoring

Optimizing the energy consumption in monitoring and communication protocols for wireless sensor networks has become the most important performance objective. We explore the problem of maximizing sensor network lifetime, i.e., time during which the set of targets is covered. We propose centralized algorithms for lifetime maximization with provable approximation ratio for the realistic model studied. In this paper we introduce reliability requirement for distributed target-monitoring protocols and prove that previously considered protocols are reliable. A new deterministic energy-efficient protocol for sensor networks (DEEPS) aimed at prolonging lifetime is proposed. We prove that DEEPS is reliable and compare DEEPS with several known target-monitoring protocols in NS2 environment using LEACH (W. Heinzelman et al., 2000) for simulating monitoring data delivery to the base. Our contributions also include the first full-fledged simulation of the monitoring protocols on NS2 combined with LEACH (W. Heinzelman et al., 2000) as a communication protocol, and extensive experimental study of several protocols showing almost 2 times increase in the lifetime for DEEPS over known protocols