Scalable Coverage Maintenance for Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

Owing to numerous potential applications, wireless sensor networks have been attracting much research effort recently. The critical challenge that wireless sensor networks often face is to sustain long-term operation on limited battery energy. Coverage maintenance schemes can effectively prolong network lifetime by maintaining sufficient sensing coverage over a target region using a small number of active sensors while scheduling the other sensors to sleep. We envision future wireless sensor networks are composed of a vast number of extremely miniaturized sensors (e.g., millimeter-scale) deployed in exceedingly high density (e.g., more than 1000sensors/m²). Therefore, the key issue of coverage maintenance for the future sensor networks is the scalability to sensor deployment density. In this paper, we propose a novel coverage maintenance scheme, called scalable coverage maintenance (SCOM). SCOM is energy efficient and scalable to sensor deployment density in terms of communication overhead (i.e., number of transmitted and received beacons) and computational complexity (i.e., time and space complexity). We validate our claims through both analysis and simulations