A Review of Coverage and Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

The special constraints of sensor networks impose a number of technical challenges for employing them. This paper presents the issues and existing protocols in three areas: coverage and routing. The authors present two types of coverage problems: to determine the minimum number of sensor nodes that need to perform active sensing in order to monitor a certain area; and to decide the quality of service that can be provided by a given sensor network. While most routing protocols in sensor networks are data-centric, there are other types of routing protocols as well, such as hierarchical, location-based, and QoS-aware. They describe and compare several protocols in each group.