A Performance Evaluation of the Coverage Configuration Protocol and its Applicability to Precision Agriculture

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have recently emerged as a prominent technology for lots of civilian and military applications in both rural and urban environments. Area coverage configuration is an efficient method to alleviate the nodes’ limited energy supply in high density WSNs. It consists in selecting as few active sensors as possible from all deployed nodes while ensuring sufficient sensing coverage of the monitored region. Several coverage configuration protocols have been developed; most of them presume the availability of precise knowledge about node locations and sensing ranges. Relaxing these conservative assumptions might affect the performance of coverage configuration protocols. In this chapter, the authors examine the impact of location errors, irregular sensing ranges, and packet losses on the Coverage Configuration Protocol (CCP). The authors focus more precisely on the impact of using this protocol on a real application: precision agriculture where farmers need to cover the entire terrain with sensors in order to rapidly detect and localize spots requiring chemical treatment. Amine Dhraief University of Manouba, Tunisia Imen Mahjri University of Manouba, Tunisia Abdelfettah Belghith University of Manouba, Tunisia