4 \section{\uppercase{Introduction}}
5 \label{sec:introduction}
7 \noindent In the last years, there has been an increasing development in wireless
8 networking, Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), and embedded computing
9 technologies, which have led to construct low-cost, small-sized, and low-power
10 sensor nodes that can perform detection, computation, and data communication of
11 surrounding environment. A WSN includes a large number of small, limited-power
12 sensors that can sense, process, and transmit data over a wireless
13 communication. They communicate with each other by using multi-hop wireless
14 communications and cooperate together to monitor the area of interest, so that
15 each measured data can be reported to a monitoring center called sink for
16 further analysis~\cite{Sudip03}.
18 There are several fields of application covering a wide spectrum for a WSN,
19 including health, home, environmental, military, and industrial
20 applications~\cite{Akyildiz02}. One of the major scientific research challenges
21 in WSNs, which has been addressed by a large amount of literature during the
22 last few years, is the design of energy efficient approaches for coverage and
23 connectivity~\cite{conti2014mobile}. On the one hand an optimal
24 coverage~\cite{Nayak04} is required to monitor efficiently and continuously the
25 area of interest and on the other hand the energy consumption must be as low as
26 possible, due to the limited energy of sensors~\cite{Sudip03} and the
27 impossibility or difficulty to replace and/or recharge their batteries because
28 of the area of interest nature (such as remote, hostile, or unpractical
29 environments) and the cost. So, it is of great relevance for a WSN to be
30 deployed with high density, because spatial redundancy can then be exploited to
31 increase the lifetime of the network. However, turning on all the sensor nodes
32 which monitor the same region at the same time reduces the the lifetime of the
33 network. Therefore, to extend the lifetime of the network, the main idea is to
34 take advantage of the overlapping sensing regions of some sensor nodes to save
35 energy by turning off some of them during the sensing phase~\cite{Misra}.
37 In this paper we concentrate on the area coverage problem with the objective of
38 maximizing the network lifetime by using an adaptive scheduling. The area of
39 interest is divided into subregions and an activity scheduling for sensor nodes
40 is planned for each subregion. In fact, the nodes in a subregion can be seen as
41 a cluster where each node sends sensing data to the cluster head or the sink
42 node. Furthermore, the activities in a subregion/cluster can continue even if
43 another cluster stops due to too many node failures. Our scheduling scheme
44 considers rounds, where a round starts with a discovery phase to exchange
45 information between sensors of the subregion, in order to choose in a suitable
46 manner a sensor node to carry out a coverage strategy. This coverage strategy
47 involves the solving of an integer program, which provides the activation of the
48 sensors for the sensing phase of the current round.
50 The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The next section
52 reviews the related work in the field. Section~\ref{pd} is devoted to the
53 DiLCO protocol Description. Section~\ref{cp} gives the coverage model
54 formulation which is used to schedule the activation of sensors.
55 Section~\ref{exp} shows the simulation results obtained using the discrete event
56 simulator OMNeT++ \cite{varga}. They fully demonstrate the usefulness of the
57 proposed approach. Finally, we give concluding remarks and some suggestions for
58 future works in Section~\ref{sec:conclusion}.
83 \subsubsection{Active Sensors Ratio}
84 Figure~\ref{fig4} shows the average active nodes ratio for 150 deployed nodes.
87 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R1/ASR.pdf}
88 \caption{The impact of the number of rounds on the active sensors ratio for 150 deployed nodes }
91 The results presented in figure~\ref{fig4} show the increase in the number of subregions led to increase in the number of active nodes. The DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols have a larger number of active nodes but it preserve the coverage for a larger number of rounds. The advantage of the DiLCO-16, and DiLCO-32 protocols are that even if a network is disconnected in one subregion, the other ones usually continues the optimization process, and this extends the lifetime of the network.
93 \subsubsection{The percentage of stopped simulation runs}
94 Figure~\ref{fig6} illustrates the percentage of stopped simulation runs per round for 150 deployed nodes.
97 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R1/SR.pdf}
98 \caption{The percentage of stopped simulation runs compared to the number of rounds for 150 deployed nodes }
102 It can be observed that the DiLCO-2 is the approach which stops first because it applied the optimization on only two subregions for the area of interest that is why it is first exhibits network disconnections.
103 Thus, as explained previously, in case of the DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 with several subregions the optimization effectively continues as long as a network in a subregion is still connected. This longer partial coverage optimization participates in extending the network lifetime.
117 \subsection{Performance Comparison for Different Approaches}
118 After extensive study for our primary point model, we found that DiLCO protocol gives better results if the sensor coverage model represented by 9 primary points. Based on the results, which are conducted from previous subsection~\ref{sub1}, we found that Our DiLCO-16, and DiLCO-32 protocols are the best candidates to be compared with other two approches. The first approach, called DESK that proposed by ~\cite{ChinhVu}, which is a full distributed coverage algorithm. The second approach, called GAF ~\cite{xu2001geography}, consists in dividing the region into fixed squares. During the decision phase, in each square, one sensor is chosen to remain on during the sensing phase time.
120 \subsubsection{Coverage Ratio}
121 In this experiment, Figure~\ref{fig333} shows the average coverage ratio for 150 deployed nodes.
126 \includegraphics[scale=0.45] {R3/CR.pdf}
127 \caption{The coverage ratio for 150 deployed nodes}
131 It is shown that DESK and GAF provides a
132 a little better coverage ratio with 99.99\% and 99.91\% against 99.1\% and 99.2\% produced by DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 for the lowest number of rounds. This is due to the fact that our DiLCO protocol versions put in sleep mode redundant sensors using optimization (which lightly decreases the coverage ratio) while there are more nodes are active in the case of DESK and GAF.
134 Moreover, when the number of rounds increases, coverage ratio produced by DESK and GAF protocols decreases. This is due to dead nodes. However, Our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols maintains almost a good coverage. This is because it optimize the coverage and the lifetime in wireless sensor network by selecting the best representative sensor nodes to take the reponsibilty of coverage during the sensing phase and this will leads to continue for a larger number of rounds and prolonging the network lifetime; although some nodes are dead, sensor activity scheduling of our protocol chooses other nodes to ensure the coverage of the area of interest.
138 \subsubsection{Active Sensors Ratio}
139 It is important to have as few active nodes as possible in each round,
140 in order to minimize the energy consumption and maximize the network lifetime. Figure~\ref{fig444} shows the average active nodes ratio for 150 deployed nodes.
144 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R3/ASR.pdf}
145 \caption{The active sensors ratio for 150 deployed nodes }
149 The results presented in figure~\ref{fig444} show the superiority of the proposed DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols, in comparison with the other approaches. We can observe that DESK and GAF have 37.5 \% and 44.5 \% active nodes and our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols competes perfectly with only 17.4 \%, 24.8 \% and 26.8 \% active nodes for the first 14 rounds. Then as the number of rounds increases our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols have larger number of active nodes in comparison with DESK and GAF, especially from round $35^{th}$ because they give a better coverage ratio than other approaches. We see that the DESK and GAF have less number of active nodes beginning at the rounds $35^{th}$ and $32^{th}$ because there are many nodes are died due to the high energy consumption by the redundant nodes during the sensing phase.
151 \subsubsection{The percentage of stopped simulation runs}
152 The results presented in this experiment, is to show the comparison of our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols with other two approaches from the point of view the stopped simulation runs per round.
153 Figure~\ref{fig666} illustrates the percentage of stopped simulation
154 runs per round for 150 deployed nodes.
157 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R3/SR.pdf}
158 \caption{The percentage of stopped simulation runs compared to the number of rounds for 150 deployed nodes }
161 It can be observed that the DESK is the approach, which stops first because it consumes more energy for communication as well as it turn on a large number of redundant nodes during the sensing phase. Our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols have less stopped simulation runs in comparison with DESK and GAF because it distributed the optimization on several subregions in order to optimize the coverage and the lifetime of the network by activating a less number of nodes during the sensing phase leading to extend the network lifetime and coverage preservation.The optimization effectively continues as long as a network in a subregion is still connected.
165 \subsubsection{The Energy Consumption}
166 In this experiment, we study the effect of the energy consumed by the wireless sensor network during the communication, computation, listening, active, and sleep modes for different network densities and compare it with other approaches. Figures~\ref{fig3EC95} and ~\ref{fig3EC50} illustrate the energy consumption for different network sizes for $Lifetime95$ and $Lifetime50$.
170 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R3/EC95.pdf}
171 \caption{The Energy Consumption with $95\%-Lifetime$}
177 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R3/EC50.pdf}
178 \caption{The Energy Consumption with $Lifetime50$}
182 The results show that our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols are the most competitive from the energy consumption point of view. The other approaches have a high energy consumption due to activating a larger number of redundant nodes as well as the energy consumed during the different modes of sensor nodes. In fact, a distributed method on the subregions greatly reduces the number of communications and the time of listening so thanks to the partitioning of the initial network into several independent subnetworks.
184 \subsubsection{The Network Lifetime}
185 In this experiment, we are observed the superiority of our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols against other two approaches in prolonging the network lifetime. In figures~\ref{fig3LT95} and \ref{fig3LT50}, network lifetime, $Lifetime95$ and $Lifetime50$ respectively, are illustrated for different network sizes.
189 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R3/LT95.pdf}
190 \caption{The Network Lifetime for $Lifetime95$}
197 \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{R3/LT50.pdf}
198 \caption{The Network Lifetime for $Lifetime50$}
202 As highlighted by figures~\ref{fig3LT95} and \ref{fig3LT50}, the network lifetime obviously
203 increases when the size of the network increases, with our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols
204 that leads to maximize the lifetime of the network compared with other approaches.
205 By choosing the best suited nodes, for each round, by optimizing the coverage and lifetime of the network to cover the area of interest and by letting the other ones sleep in order to be used later in next rounds, our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols efficiently prolonges the network lifetime.
206 Comparison shows that our DiLCO-16 and DiLCO-32 protocols, which are used distributed optimization over the subregions, is the best one because it is robust to network disconnection during the network lifetime as well as it consume less energy in comparison with other approaches. It also means that distributing the algorithm in each node and subdividing the sensing field into many subregions, which are managed
207 independently and simultaneously, is the most relevant way to maximize the lifetime of a network.