A Time and Energy Efficient Protocol for Locating Coverage Holes in WSNs

Abstract

There are two main requirements in dealing with coverage holes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs): locating the hole boundary and finding the locations to deploy new sensors for hole patching. The current protocols on finding the patching locations always require re-running the protocols from scratch many times. This constraint causes the time complexity and energy overhead to increase proportionally to the hole size. In this paper, we propose a lightweight protocol to determine coverage holes in wireless sensor network. Our protocol does not only can determine the exact hole boundary but also approximate the boundary by a simpler shape which can help to speed up the patching location finding process. The simulation experiments show that our protocol can reduce more than 56% of time complexity and save more than 46% of energy overhead in comparison with existing protocols.