Coverage aware face topology structure for wireless sensor network applications

Providing effective sensing coverage of an observation area with reduced set of working nodes for maximum duration of time is an important concern for the development of durable and energy efficient WSN applications. A well-organized network structure can greatly promote such requirements. Motivated by the use of computational geometry in network design, we propose a coverage-aware and efficient planar face topology structure (CAFT) for WSN in this paper. Also, a distributed target tracking algorithm is proposed to run on the proposed face structure. Most of the existing works utilize the face based WSNs which are built by generating planarized graphs using Gabriel graph or Relative neighborhood graph in which all the deployed nodes become a part of the created toplogy. In contrast to this, our proposed distributed topology construction method selects and organizes a subset of nodes into faces, ensures coverage and connectivity while retaining the remaining nodes in sleep mode which can reduce redundant communication that may result in extra energy consumption and cost. The sleep nodes can promote durable service time for the WSN as such nodes can act as replacement nodes in case of node faults and failures, reducing coverage hole formation in the WSN, which is crucial in critical tracking applications. The simulation results and comparison with existing techniques prove that the proposed design is effective in reducing the energy consumption and thereby improves the WSN lifetime.