A Randomized Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime Optimization

A wireless sensor network consists of a set of sensors S and a monitored set of targets (or an area) T. Typically, there are much more sensors than the targets, but their operation time is limited by the battery capacity. The sensors may be randomly deployed, especially in hard-to-reach areas, such as mountains, forests, battlefields, etc. In this work, we tackle the Maximum α-Lifetime Problem, which aims at maximizing the network lifetime by successively activating and deactivating the subsets of sensors ensuring expected minimum coverage rate α. To solve the problem, we propose and evaluate a randomized heuristic algorithm for the maximization of network lifetime while satisfying the coverage requirement. The conducted experiments show that the algorithm is competitive with the state-of-the-art approach in terms of obtained schedule lengths.