Minimum Dominating Sets for Solving the Coverage Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the major requirements for new wireless sensor networks is to extend the lifetime of the network. Node scheduling techniques have been used extensively for this purpose. Some existing approaches rely mainly on location information through GPS devices for designing efficient scheduling strategies. However, integration of GPS devices with sensor nodes is expensive and increases the cost of deployment dramatically. In this paper we present a location-free solution for node scheduling. Our scheme is based on a graph theoretical approach using minimum dominating sets. We propose a heuristic to extract a collection of dominating sets. Each set comprises of a group of working nodes which ensures a high level of network coverage. At each round, one set is responsible for covering the sensor field while the nodes in other sets are in sleep mode. We evaluate our solution through simulations and discuss our future research directions.