Improving the Deployment of WSNs by Localized Detection of Covered Redundant Nodes in Industry 4.0 Applications

Wireless sensor networks can be used as cost-effective monitoring and automation platforms in smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Maximizing the covered area and increasing the network lifetime are two challenging tasks in wireless sensor networks. A feasible solution for maximizing the coverage area and network lifetime is detecting and relocating the covered redundant nodes. A covered redundant node is a node whose covered area is also covered by the other active nodes in the network. After identifying the covered redundant nodes, putting them in sleep mode can increase the network lifetime. In addition, moving the detected redundant nodes to the uncovered locations can improve the overall covered area by the sensor nodes. However, finding the redundant nodes is an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we propose a localized distributed algorithm for identifying the redundant nodes based on the 2-hop local neighborhood information of the nodes. The proposed algorithm uses the existing connections between the neighbors of each sensor node to decide the redundancy of the node. The algorithm is localized and does not need the entire topology of the network or the coordinates of the nodes. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.