Energy Efficient Coverage and Connectivity with Varying Energy Level in WSN

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an emerging area of research in the field of communication. With the explosive growth of its applications, WSN goes through various challenges. One of the important challenges is to maintain both coverage and connectivity in WSN. In this paper, we address the issue of maintaining sensing coverage and network connectivity in WSN by keeping a minimal number of sensor nodes in the active mode. In accordance with the existing literature, coverage implies connectivity by taking the communication range is at least twice of the sensing range. This leads to increase the energy consumption in WSN. In the present work, we maintain the connectivity even in the situation where the communication range is less than twice of sensing range. This reduces the energy consumption in WSN. The proposed algorithm uses different energy levels of the active nodes that help in prolonging the system lifetime by minimizing the energy consumption. Extensive simulation studies of the proposed work have been carried out using Castalia simulator.