MSC Protocol for Target Coverage Issue in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are energy constrained networks which is equipped with a battery which has limited lifetime. Replacing the battery regularly is not a feasible option and is quite expensive since a sensor network is comprised of many nodes and replacing several nodes involves high maintenance cost. Thus effective sensor scheduling and power management is a vital requirement which will optimize the lifetime of the sensor network. In this paper we analyze the sensor scheduling and target coverage issue in sensor networks and propose a new technique which can optimize the placement of sensor nodes into a monitored area and their organization so that the full coverage is achieved with minimal energy consumption. Specifically, we have developed a heuristic that organizes the available sensor nodes into mutually exclusive sets where the members of each of those sets completely cover the monitored area.