Abstract
The advances of wireless and sensing technologies have opened up new doors for wide application of sensor networks. To fully achieve the potentials of wireless sensor networks, however, a few challenging issues have to be solved. While a majority of the research has focused on energy preservation, little attention has been paid to the coverage preservation as a quality of services requirements. Another issue that is often overlooked is the inherent energy heterogeneity among sensor nodes in the network. In this paper, we will conduct an empirical study on some improved heterogeneity-aware clustering protocols, and compare their performance on network lifetime as well as coverage preservation under energy heterogeneity. We define a "full coverage time", as well as a spatial uniformity measurement. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the new protocols in this respect. Our conclusion is that the energy heterogeneity can be harnessed and it is promising to find optimized solutions for prolonged network lifetime and coverage preservation simultaneously.