CDSWS: coverage-guaranteed distributed sleep/wake scheduling for wireless sensor networks

Minimizing the energy consumption of battery-powered sensors is an essential consideration in sensor network applications, and sleep/wake scheduling mechanism has been proved to an efficient approach to handling this issue. In this article, a coverage-guaranteed distributed sleep/wake scheduling scheme is presented with the purpose of prolonging network lifetime while guaranteeing network coverage. Our scheme divides sensor nodes into clusters based on sensing coverage metrics and allows more than one node in each cluster to keep active simultaneously via a dynamic node selection mechanism. Further, a dynamic refusal scheme is presented to overcome the deadlock problem during cluster merging process, which has not been specially investigated before. The simulation results illustrate that CDSWS outperforms some other existed algorithms in terms of coverage guarantee, algorithm efficiency and energy conservation.