Determining active sensor nodes for complete coverage without location information

Selecting a partial set of sensor nodes for execution and still maintaining the system sensing coverage is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. The previous research was concentrated on the location-aware sensor networks but little attention has been devoted to the location-free environments. This paper describes an approach to determining active nodes for full coverage without location information. Such environment can not provide sufficient information to detect blind spots. A triangular self-test mechanism is developed to examine the existence of blind areas and to remove the blind spots by activate sleeping sensor nodes. The selection mechanism was evaluated using network simulator ns-2 Two other related algorithms, PEAS and OGDC, were also implemented for performance comparison. The simulation measured the metrics in control overhead, size of the active set, and the sensing coverage. The results show that our algorithm aids profit in network scalability, energy efficiency, and number of active sensor nodes without the need of location information.