Sleep scheduling with predictive coverage redundancy check in wireless sensor networks

Area coverage, which reflects how well each point in the sensing field is monitored, is one of the most important performance metrics to measure sensor networks. However, it requires the activation of many redundant sensors. The sleep/wake scheduling mechanism is used to schedule sensors to be activated alternatively. Nevertheless, the repeated redundancy checks due to the frequent switching between states, during scheduling itself, leads also to significant energy consumption. We propose, in this paper, a Scheduling With Predictive Coverage Redundancy (SPRC), a new scheduling mechanism that mitigates the computational scheduling energy by reducing the frequency of the coverage redundancy executions. SPRC proposes an analytical model to predict the need (or not) to check redundancy in a round. The simulation results illustrate that our scheme outperforms some other existed algorithms in terms of coverage guarantee and energy conservation.