A Full Area Coverage Guaranteed, Energy Efficient Network Configuration Strategy for 3D Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), providing full area coverage while maintaining connectivity between the sensors is considered an important issue. Coverage-aware sleep scheduling is an efficient way to optimize the coverage of WSNs while maximizing the energy consumption. On the other hand, clustering can provide an efficient way to achieve high connectivity in WSNs. Despite the close relationship between the coverage problem and the clustering problem, they have been formulated, discussed and evaluated separately. Furthermore, most existing WSN strategies are designed to be applied on Two-Dimensional (2D) fields under an ideal energy consumption model that relies on calculating the Euclidean distance between any pair of sensors. In reality, sensors are mostly deployed in a Three-Dimensional (3D) field in many applications and they do exhibit a discrete energy consumption model that depends on the sensors' status rather than the distance between them. In this paper, we propose a Pareto-based network configuration strategy for 3D WSN s. In the proposed protocol, deciding the status of each sensor in a 3D WSN s is formulated as a single multi-objective minimization problem. The proposed formulation considers the following combined properties: energy efficiency, data delivery reliability, scalability, and full area coverage. The performance of the proposed protocol is tested in 3D WSNs and under a realistic energy consumption model which is based on the characteristics of the Chip con CC2420 radio transceiver data sheet.