Cell-based coverage management and routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor network, energy efficiency and full coverage are two important design requirements. To prolong the network lifetime, large numbers of sensor nodes are deployed in the target area. In such a dense network, if all sensor nodes turn on their power simultaneously, the network will experience serious collision problem and consume lots of precious energy. On the contrary, if only few sensors turn on power, there will be lots of coverage hole existing in the target area. In this paper, a hierarchical cellular network architecture which can achieve low energy consumption and full coverage through utilization of location information is proposed. Then a routing protocol with smart slot allocation is proposed on the cellular-based network architecture and can be applied to event detection and periodical event report applications. Advantages of the proposed cell-based routing protocol include low transmission latency and low energy consumption due to properly slot assignment and data aggregation. Experimental results reveal that the proposed protocol outperforms GAF in terms of network energy consumption and data transmission latency.