Target coverage through distributed clustering in directional sensor networks

Maximum target coverage with minimum number of sensor nodes, known as an MCMS problem, is an important problem in directional sensor networks (DSNs). For guaranteed coverage and event reporting, the underlying mechanism must ensure that all targets are covered by the sensors and the resulting network is connected. Existing solutions allow individual sensor nodes to determine the sensing direction for maximum target coverage which produces sensing coverage redundancy and much overhead. Gathering nodes into clusters might provide a better solution to this problem. In this paper, we have designed distributed clustering and target coverage algorithms to address the problem in an energy-efficient way. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that exploits cluster heads to determine the active sensing nodes and their directions for solving target coverage problems in DSNs. Our extensive simulation study shows that our system outperforms a number of state-of-the-art approaches.