HDRE: Coverage hole detection with residual energy in wireless sensor networks

Coverage completeness is an important indicator for quality of service in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Due to limited energy and diverse working conditions, the sensor nodes have different lifetimes which often cause network holes. Most of the existing methods expose large limitation and one-sidedness because they generally consider only one aspect, either coverage rate or energy issue. This paper presents a novel method for coverage hole detection with residual energy in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks. By calculating the life expectancy of working nodes through residual energy, we make a trade-off between network repair cost and energy waste. The working nodes with short lifetime are screened out according to a proper ratio. After that, the locations of coverage holes can be determined by calculating the joint coverage probability and the evaluation criteria. Simulation result shows that compared to those traditional algorithms without consideration of energy problem, our method can effectively maintain the coverage quality of repaired WSN while enhancing the life span of WSN at the same time.