A Voronoi Diagram-Based Integrated Protocol For Coverage And Connectivity Management In Wireless Sensor Networks

With the rapid development of wireless communication and Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technologies, Wireless SensorNetworks (WSNs) have attracted extensive attention due to their widerange of potential applications. Coverage and connectivity are two of thefundamental issues in WSNs.Coverage protocols are supposed to guarantee that a sensor networkcan observe a given physical space effectively after it is deployed.Besides coverage, connectivity is another necessary condition that shouldbe satisfied in WSNs in order to successfully perform a given task, as itgreatly affects whether sensor nodes can communicate with each otherand report data to sink nodes and finally reach users' terminals or not.Satisfactory connectivity is highly expected in order to achieverobustness and smooth communication in WSNs.This paper presents and analyzes existing coverage and connectivitysolutions in WSNs. It focuses on the solution to coverage andconnectivity in randomly deployed WSNs. It not only studies thesolutions under the condition that R_c/R_s is not less than 2, but also studiesthe solutions under the condition that R_c/R_s is less than 2, where R_c and R_sstand for the communication and sensing ranges of each sensor noderespectively. This paper proposes a Voronoi diagram-based IntegratedProtocol (VIP) for coverage and connectivity management in WSNs. Theproposed protocol adopts a distributed eligibility algorithm for detectingredundancy of sensor nodes and then scheduling the duties of sensornodes accordingly. The proposed protocol can achieve both coverage andconnectivity for any value of R_c/R_s. The proposed protocol is alsoextended to maintain k-coverage and k-connectivity and to handle thecase of dynamic change of coverage and connectivity degrees.There are only a few existing protocols that can achieve coverageand connectivity requirements in wireless sensor networks at the sametime. The protocol proposed in this paper is not only a solution tocoverage and connectivity in a randomly deployed wireless sensornetwork, but also a solution to guarantee k-coverage and k-connectivity in a wireless sensor network. So the proposed protocol can be used as areference to the related research and study.