BCoPS: an energy‐efficient routing protocol with coverage preservation

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, an energy-efficient routing protocol plays a crucial role in extending the lifetime of the network. In order to realise this, an optimal coverage-preserving scheme (OCoPS) has been proposed by Boukerche et al. in 2005 as an add-on to the Low-energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. This scheme operates alongside another coverage-preserving scheme that excludes redundant nodes if their on-duty neighbours fully overlap in terms of their sensing ranges, hence saving energy. In this study, the authors propose a central angle decision algorithm that ensures that it does not introduce any coverage hole after applying the coverage-preserving scheme. They also propose a base station (BS)-aided clustering routing protocol with a coverage-preserving scheme (BCoPS) to assess the applicability of the authors’ proposed algorithm to routing protocols and verify the performance gains. In BCoPS, energy-intensive tasks for deployed sensor nodes are substituted by the BS to ensure longer network lifetime. The performance of the BCoPS was compared to that of LEACH and OCoPS. The results of simulations carried out in considered scenarios showed that BCoPS outperformed OCoPS by >20% in terms of network lifetime in general, and by >30% when the coverage rate was higher than 80%.