A Distributed Lifetime-Maximized Target Coverage Game

Wireless sensor nodes are electronic devices capable of collecting, storing, and processing environmental information, and communicating with other sensor nodes through wireless communications. Hundreds or thousands of wireless sensor nodes deployed in a region of interest comprise a wireless sensor network (WSN), where all members cooperatively monitor the whole region, barriers, or targets (points) within the region [Cardei and Wu 2004]. In this paper, we are interested in complete coverage of a set of monitored targets at all time, a requirement known as target coverage. In this problem, a sensor node is said to cover some target if that target is under the surveillance of the sensor. Since sensor nodes are usually densely deployed, covering all targets demands only a small subset of sensor nodes. The rest can enter sleep mode to conserve precious energy. These sensors can be powered on later to take over the covering task and thus prolong network operation time. Determining whether individual sensors should be ac-