SOCCP: Self Organize Coverage and Connectivity Protocol

Abstract

Recent developments in wireless communication and embedded computing technologies have led to the advent of wireless sensor network technology. Hundreds of thousands of these micro sensors can be deployed in many areas including health, environment and battlefield in order to monitor the domain with desired level of accuracy. When wireless sensors are deployed in an area, the lifetime of the network should last as long as possible according to the original amount of energy. Therefore, reducing energy consumption in WSNs is of primary concern. In this work, we have presented a protocol to maintain coverage and connectivity in wireless sensor networks, while switching off sensing or communication subsystem of some nodes to increase the network lifetime. The protocol presented here is a type of cluster based approach in which only a special set of nodes -- coordinators -- participate in packet routing but still each node decide independently to remain sensor, goes to sleep or become a coordinator. All nodes of the network generate a local coverage bitmap and based on this bitmap they decide to remain sensor or go to sleep. Using this local bitmap, the network will be capable of producing desired percentage of coverage. By using a local asynchronous scheduling, we have devised a mechanism to reduce interference between coordinator message broadcasts.