Energy efficient military surveillance: coverage meets connectivity

Sensor networks are increasingly being used in the development and application of military surveillance systems. Small size battery-powered sensor devices are deployed in unattended and hostile environments, such as battlefields to detect any physical intrusion. Energy efficiency, coverage, and connectivity are the three major quality-of-service requirements of such mission critical applications. Energy-efficient communication is required to prolong the network lifetime. Better coverage is required to detect the physical intrusion attempts of all kinds. Similarly, connectivity is necessary to provide mission critical messages to the base station in a timely manner. A scheme that satisfies energy efficiency, coverage, and connectivity requirements is an N-P complete problem. This paper proposes an energy-efficient node scheduling algorithm called EC ₂ that addresses the problems of energy efficiency, coverage, and connectivity in military surveillance applications using the fuzzy graphs.