An Evidential Approach for Area Coverage in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

The study of coverage problem in uncertain WSN environment requires the consideration of this uncertainty by taking the best possible decisions, since it is impossible to explicitly represent all the combinatorics to produce a conditional active/passive state nodes' planning in the area of interest, and allow reasoning on various environmental states of the partially known physical world. This paper addresses the problem of area coverage based on the Dempster-Shafer theory. The authors aim to ensure the full area coverage while using a subset of connected nodes, with minimal costs using a minimal number of dominant nodes regardless of the type of used deployment (random or deterministic). This is ensured by activating a single node in each subset of each geographic sub-area, thus extending the lifetime of the wireless sensor network to its maximum. The comparison of the proposed model denoted evidential approach for area coverage (EAAC) with two well-known protocols and with a recent one showed a better performance and a slight improvement in the covered area.