The problem of field or area coverage in Directional Sensor Networks (DSNs) presents huge research challenges including appropriate selection of sensors with their active sensing directions in an energy-efficient way. Existing solutions permit to execute coverage enhancement algorithms in each individual sensor nodes, leading to high communication and computation overheads, loss of energy and reduced accuracy. In this paper, we have proposed a novel network lifetime aware area coverage solution, NLAC, for a clustered DSN, where distributed cluster heads (CHs) have the responsibility of determining the number of active member nodes and their sensing directions.
The CHs minimizes the overlapping coverage area and energy consumption by switching more nodes in sleep state. The proposed NLAC system is fully distributed and it exploits single-hop neighborhood information only. Results from extensive simulations, show that NLAC system offers better performance in terms of covering area and networklife.