Deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has drawn much attention in recent years. Given the limited energy for sensor nodes, it is critical to implement WSNs with energy efficiency designs. Sensing coverage in networks, on the other hand, may degrade gradually over time after WSNs are activated. For mission-critical applications, therefore, energy-efficient coverage control should be taken into consideration to support the quality of service (QoS) of WSNs. Usually, coverage-controlling strategies present some challenging problems: (1) resolving the conflicts while determining which nodes should be turned off to conserve energy; (2) designing an optimal wake-up scheme that avoids awakening more nodes than necessary. In this paper, we implement an energy-efficient coverage control in cluster-based WSNs using a Memetic Algorithm (MA)-based approach, entitled CoCMA, to resolve the challenging problems. The CoCMA contains two optimization strategies: a MA-based schedule for sensor nodes and a wake-up scheme, which are responsible to prolong the network lifetime while maintaining coverage preservation. The MA-based schedule is applied to a given WSN to avoid unnecessary energy consumption caused by the redundant nodes. During the network operation, the wake-up scheme awakens sleeping sensor nodes to recover coverage hole caused by dead nodes. The performance evaluation of the proposed CoCMA was conducted on a cluster-based WSN (CWSN) under either a random or a uniform deployment of sensor nodes. Simulation results show that the performance yielded by the combination of MA and wake-up scheme is better than that in some existing approaches. Furthermore, CoCMA is able to activate fewer sensor nodes to monitor the required sensing area.
Keywords: energy efficiency; memetic algorithm; sensing coverage; wireless sensor network.