A novel energy-efficient clustering protocol with area coverage awareness for wireless sensor networks

Coverage is a key metric in evaluating the monitoring capacity and quality of services in wireless sensor networks. The energy consumption of self-contained sensors is also a challenging problem for energy-efficient use while still achieving better coverage performance. Although techniques have been developed to mitigate the problem of area coverage, particularly together with efficient clustering methods, none focuses intensively on the sensor activation stage, which is used to maintain coverage while optimizing energy usage. In this research, we thus propose a cover set to find the minimum set of sensors that completely cover the sensing ranges within an interest area as a criterion for sensor activation. Our main goal is to select an optimal number of active sensors considering residual energy and the cover set and to keep alive the important sensors for the sensing coverage task as long as possible. Additionally, this research proposes an area coverage-aware clustering protocol (ACACP) with energy consumption optimization with respect to the activation sensor, network clustering, and multi-hop communication to improve overall network lifetime while preserving coverage. Throughout the intensive simulation, given a diversity of deployments with scalability concern, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of ACACP when compared with other competitive approaches such as ECDC and DECAR, including state-of-the-art clustering protocols such as LEACH, in terms of coverage ratio and overall network lifetime.