Energy Constrained Target K-coverage Algorithm in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a novel energy constrained target K-coverage algorithm, and the proposed algorithm is suitable to be exploited in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. Particularly, the network activity in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks in this paper is organized in rounds, and each round is constructed by initial step and information sensing step. Furthermore, to prolong the network lifetime in target K-coverage process, the remaining energy and the sensing ability of each sensor are calculated in advance. Afterwards, the sensing unit set is defined to record sensing attributes that can be only covered by the target sensors. Furthermore, the attribute set contains several sensing attributes, and these attributes can cover the targets utilizing the specific sensing unit. In order to guarantee the K-coverage constraints, for each sensing attribute, we set a function to test whether the sensing attribute is covered. If the sensing attribute is covered by at least K sensors, the function return true, and then the decisions which represent if a sensor should be turned on or not are broadcast to each sensor’s one-hop neighbors. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted to make performance evaluation. In these experiments, all targets and wireless sensors are randomly allocated in the sensing field, and six types of experimental settings with different number wireless sensor are utilized. Experimental results show that, our proposed algorithm performs better than EF method and KTC_MNL method, and the performance of our algorithm is close to the optimal method.