A Heuristic Algorithm for Extending Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network can be employed in many applications, such as military, environmental surveillance and healthcare. Due to the limited resources of the sensor nodes, energy efficiency issue is one of the most critical issues for WSN. The purpose of many researches is to prolong lifetime of sensor network. Lifetime is times that the sink can collect data from all sensor nodes. When a user proposes a query, then the sink gathers data from all sensor nodes. One effective approach is to partition sensors into several covers, each of which must include all targets, and then to activate these covers iteratively. The problem of finding the maximum number of covers has been modeled as the SET K-COVER problem, which has been proved to be NP-complete problem. In order to prolong lifetime of WSN, this work proposes an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve this problem. The algorithm was implemented in a wires sensor network simulator and some extensive experiment was conducted. The simulation results on numerous problem instances confirm that the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in extending the lifetime of WSN.