Connected Area Coverage Sets in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of small sensor nodes with limited battery and processing capability. During any time, a number of sensor nodes must be kept active to sense the covered area and maintain the connectivity to the base station. This paper addresses the minimum connected area coverage set problem with equal sensing and communicating radii. With location information of its neighbor, each node selects minimum number of its neighbor nodes as sensing and forwarding nodes to cover the sensing area of itself and all its neighbors and guarantee the connectivity to all its two-hop neighbors. After exchanging the sensing and forwarding node set with its neighbors, each node decides whether it should be active. The active sensor nodes together guarantee area coverage and connectivity. The proposed algorithm is fully localized with O(n log n) time complexity and O(n) message complexity where n is the maximum number of neighbors.