An Energy Efficient Distributed Protocol for Ensuring Coverage and Connectivity (E3C2) of Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) continue to attract more and more researchers attention, new ideas for applications are continually being developed, many of which involve consistent coverage with good network connectivity of a given area of interest. For the successful operation of the wireless Sensor Network, the active sensor nodes must maintain both coverage and also connectivity. These are two closely related essential prerequisites and they are also very important measurements of quality of service (QoS)for wireless sensor networks. This paper presents the design and analysis of novel protocols that can dynamically configure a sensor network to result in guaranteed degrees of coverage and connectivity. This protocol is simulated using NS2 simulated and compared against a distributed probabilistic coveragepreserving configuration protocol (DPCCP) with SPAN [1] protocol in the literature and show that it activates lesser number of sensor nodes, consumes much lesser energy and maximises the network lifetime significantly.