Using Partial Coverage Strategy to Prolong Service Time of a Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

For the design of a wireless sensor network, researchers always focus on how to take advantage of all sensor nodes to work for covering the whole sense area. This strategy can be classified as complete coverage strategy. A criticism been ignored that the goal of complete coverage is detrimental to the lifespan of network because the overlapping of sensor area among nodes result in unnecessary waste of energy. This study proposes another proposition from the idea of partial coverage strategy. A near perfect coverage rate can be achieved by least nodes to save the energy of the whole system. The proposed method in this paper can adjust required coverage rate to achieve graceful degradation according to the amount of live sensor nodes, and forms a multi-hop cluster network with a required connectivity. The method is suitable for practical applications of largescale or high-density wireless sensor networks due to its distributed processing and scalable cluster topology.