Error-Tolerant and Energy-Efficient Coverage Control Based on Biological Attractor Selection Model in Wireless Sensor Networks

A coverage problem is one of the important issues to prolong the lifetime of a wireless sensor network while guaranteeing that the target region is monitored by a sufficient number of active nodes. Most of existing protocols use geometric algorithm for each node to estimate the degree of coverage and determine whether to monitor around or sleep. These algorithms require accurate information about the location, sensing area, and sensing state of neighbor nodes. Therefore, they suffer from localization error leading to degradation of coverage and redundancy of active nodes. In addition, they introduce communication overhead leading to energy depletion. In this paper, we propose a novel coverage control mechanism, where each node relies on neither accurate location information nor communication with neighbor nodes. To enable autonomous decision on nodes, we adopt the nonlinear mathematical model of adaptive behavior of biological systems to dynamically changing environment. Through simulation, we show that the proposal outperforms the existing protocol in terms of the degree of coverage per node and the overhead under the influence of localization error.