Randomized coverage-preserving scheduling schemes for wireless sensor networks

Maintaining a long network lifetime with stringent energy constraints on tiny sensor nodes poses an extremely challenging task for wireless sensor networks. This paper provides a thorough analysis on a randomized algorithm that makes scheduling decisions without the help of geographic information. The analytical results precisely describe the relationship among achievable network coverage, energy saving, and node density. We also analyze the performance of the randomized algorithm with time asynchrony and propose a heuristic randomized scheduling scheme to improve the performance.