Information Coverage Configuration with Energy Preservation in Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Coverage configuration is an important issue in large scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Existing coverage configuration methods are generally based on the concept of physical coverage. That is, a point is covered if it is located within the sensing area of at least one sensor. Different from physical coverage, information coverage is based on the estimated accuracy of information gathering at a given location. This paper investigates the configuration problem of the information coverage in WSN. Since the concept of sensing area is not suitable for studying information coverage, this paper defines occupation area rather than sensing area to decide whether a sensor should be ON. Checking ON-duty eligibility is formulated as a nonlinear programming problem. A simple algorithm is developed for implementing ON-duty eligibility check with limited computation capability of sensor nodes and an information coverage configuration protocol (ICCP) is designed. Simulation results show that ICCP outperforms physical coverage based configuration methods. 1. Introduction