An Integrated Protocol for Maintaining Connectivity and Coverage under Probabilistic Models for Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose a distributed connectivity maintenance protocol that explicitly accounts for the probabilistic nature of wireless communication links. The proposed protocol is simple to implement and it achieves a given target communication quality between nodes, which is quantified by the minimum packet delivery rate between any pair of nodes in the network. We demonstrate the robustness of the proposed protocol against random node failures, inaccuracy of node locations, and imperfect time synchronization of nodes using extensive simulations. We extend our connectivity protocol to provide probabilistic coverage as well, where the sensing ranges of sensors follow probabilistic models. Because it employs both probabilistic communication and sensing models, the proposed protocol is more suitable for real sensor network environments than other protocols in the literature that assume a simple disk model for communication and sensing. We compare our protocol against others in the literature and show that it activates fewer number of nodes, consumes much less energy, and significantly prolongs the network lifetime.