An integrated framework for localization and coverage maintenance in wireless sensor networks

Sensing coverage in wireless sensor networks is one of the most fundamental issues, which have been extensively addressed in the literature. It is viewed as one of the critical performance measures in large-scale sensor networks. In this context, researchers have designed several coverage protocols. Throughout the variety of research works in this topic, most interests focused purely on the coverage problem under the restrictive assumption that each deployed node is equipped with a GPS receiver that provides a sensor node with its accurate location. However, in some wireless sensor network applications GPS service may be inaccessible, unpractical and very expensive. Faced to this challenge, several GPS-less localization algorithms for wireless sensor networks have been proposed. Such localization algorithms enable sensor nodes to locate themselves with some degree of accuracy. In this paper, we address the issue of maintaining coverage from the perspective of a GPS-less localization. We particularly integrate two well-known coverage and GPS-less localization solutions, namely CCP and AT-Dist. This integration yields key insights for handling coverage and GPS-less localization in a unified framework in contrast to several existing approaches that address the two issues in isolation. To the best of our knowledge, this will be the first work that integrates those two solutions. Extensive simulations show the effectiveness of this integrated framework to provide guaranteed coverage and localization.