Efficient energy aware area coverage in WSNs: a 2L-Voronoi guided PSO approach

This work proposes a two-level Voronoi (2L-Voronoi) based method for maximizing the area coverage in WSNs. The distribution of sensor nodes on a region of interest (ROI) is used into two levels. Initially, half of the sensor nodes are placed at random locations of a given ROI and then, the corresponding Voronoi polygon is determined. In the next level, the rest half of the sensor nodes, depending on the current coverage hole, are placed in intended locations to improve the coverage percentage. The PSO algorithm is used to determine the optimal locations of the sensor nodes for obtaining maximum coverage in this ROI. Here, the PSO is guided by a two-level Voronoi polygon and a fitness function is used to obtain faster convergence towards finding the best possible coverage percentage. This in turn can minimize the number of coverage holes. By this proposed approach, a large number of active sensor nodes are obtained for its faster convergence. The lower energy requirements of the sensor nodes can improve the lifetime of the network. Various simulation results are shown to highlight effectiveness of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods.