Energy-Efficient Fault Tolerant Coverage for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are generally deployed in harsh environments to perform sensing operations and communication between sensors to report the events in applications like military surveillance, environmental monitoring, and etc. Sensor networks are resource constrained and the tiny size of sensors limits transmission power, bandwidth, and memory space. Errors in sensor networks such as noise interference, signal fading, and terrain pose a challenge in detecting and reporting events. Events undetected or not reported reduce the quality of any coverage protocol. As sensors are battery operated and energy constrained, there is also a need to maintain energy efficiency of the network. Current coverage protocols only focus on the entire area being covered but not event reporting and energy efficiency. To ensure that a better quality of service is provided by coverage protocols, there is a need for providing fault tolerance and event reporting while maintaining energy efficiency of the network. This thesis proposes a fault tolerant coverage protocol that enhances event reporting with the help of additional support structure and energy efficiency by reducing the communication. To further reduce the energy consumption and congestion in the network, only a subset of nodes are chosen to perform sensing and communication. We implemented our coverage protocol using the ns2 simulator for evaluating its performance. Simulation results show that our protocol has better event reporting and energy savings