Coverage Eligibility Rule based Coverage Maintenance Protocol for Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Problem statement: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) comprise of small nodes with sensing, computation and wireless communication capabilities. Nodes in a sensor network are severely constrained by energy and computing power. Continuous working of sensor nodes leads to quick depletion of battery power and reduces the overall lifetime. To prolong the lifetime of the sensor nodes, efficient routing protocol that could also optimize the energy consumption while maintaining coverage and connectivity is required. Approach: The Coverage Maintenance Protocol (CMP) uses Coverage Eligibility Rule (CER) to find the eligibility of sensor nodes to sleep. After turning off the eligible nodes found out by CER, the network coverage degree was maintained by the remaining active nodes. If these active nodes continuously work, they consumemore energy and decreasethe lifetime. The CMP protocol helps to balance the energy consumed by active nodes,scheduling the work state of active nodes into sleeping, active and listening states. Each node in the sleeping state will not consume energy and remains idle for delay time T_d. Results: This maintained the network coverage and increased the lifetime of sensor nodes. Conclusion: The simulation results indicated that the proposed Coverage Maintenance Protocol (CMP) can significantly conserve energy increase the lifetime of sensor networks while maintaining the given coverage.