Impact of coverage preservation techniques on prolonging the network lifetime in traffic surveillance applications

Wireless sensor networks have gained importance in various domains due to their rapid development in the past years. However, their greatest limitation remains energy. The lifetime of the sensor network depends on the amount of energy consumption that reflects the amount of data processing done locally in the sensor network. Limited energy resource to the sensor becomes an obstacle for its applications. Research efforts have been focused on energy saving techniques. This paper proposes a technique that determines the redundancy of the nodes and manages to maintain the degree of coverage with the minimum of sensors that are active. The algorithm gains its effectiveness by choosing in each moment the optimal sensor that offers the best coverage. Experimental results are presented to show the efficiency of the method in prolonging the network lifetime with minimum losing of coverage.