Target Coverage and Network Connectivity Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks

Target Coverage and Network Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) plays a momentous role in the field of monitoring environment, habitant observing, disaster recovery, surveillance, etc. Coverage and Network Connectivity collectively can be considered as a proportion of Quality of Service (QoS) in a sensor network. It implies the coverage of each point in the detecting field while in the meantime fulfilling the measure that each node is surrounded by the equivalent neighbourhood of at least one other node. Many primary issues influence the outline and performance of WSN. A Comprehensive survey is made based on the scheduling algorithm and set cover approach, in which we analyze various approaches and their algorithm complexity. Firstly, the scheduling algorithm intermittently provides the required data service with guaranteed efficiency. This methodology can efficiently reduce the entire number of active nodes in the network, resulting in maximizing the network lifetime. Secondly, the set cover approach plays a major role in solving target coverage problem which group sensors into each cover set thereby, target coverage was achieved. Typical issues and open research challenges are addressed by classifying the approaches available in literature into three broad categories namely, adaptable coverage radius, coverage deployment strategy, and sleep scheduling. This survey aims to provide a better perceptive of the existing open challenges and possible futuristic approaches for target coverage and network connectivity in wireless sensor networks.