Work

SCOPE: A Hierarchical Event-Triggered Framework for Spatio-Temporal Coverage Maximization in WRSNs With Zeno-Free Scheduling Guarantees

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Spatio-temporal coverage quality is a critical performance metric in wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs). Existing studies predominantly focus on survival-oriented scheduling or centralized optimization, often relying on Boolean sensing abstractions or simplified coverage metrics. Such approaches fail to capture the stochastic nature of physical sensing under the probabilistic sensing model (PSM), overlook the diminishing returns of cooperative coverage, and exhibit limited scalability in large-scale dynamic networks with mobile chargers (MCs). This article proposes spatio-temporal coverage via partitioning and events (SCOPE), a hierarchical event-triggered framework for quality-aware coverage scheduling in WRSNs. SCOPE uses anN-aware hierarchy that transforms large-scale sensor-level charging demands into three coordinated stages: energy–coverage density construction and static partitioning, zone-level low-latency scheduling, and Lyapunov-inspired event-triggered cooperative reorganization. The theoretical analysis is restricted to a fixed-cost single-knapsack budgeted PSM grouping kernel with a constant-factor approximation guarantee, while the full multi-MC route-cost implementation is evaluated empirically. Simulation results under the evaluated settings show that SCOPE maintains an average coverage-quality ratio of approximately 0.93 under the default setting. In the dense-network case with$\textit {N}={600}$, SCOPE improves travel-normalized charging efficiency by approximately 18% over the multicharger cooperative charging mechanism (MC3), the strongest baseline in this metric, and maintains an online computation time of approximately 25–45 ms/decision for$\textit {N}={200}$–600. Theoretical analysis further establishes bounded solution quality for the scoped kernel and a scheduling-level Zeno-freeness guarantee for the event-triggered reorganization process.

Source: IEEE Sensors Journal

DOI: 10.1109/jsen.2026.3724657

Authors: Pei Xu, Shilong Han, Zijun Wu, Chih-Yung Chang, Diptendu Sinha Roy

Institutions: Hefei University, Hefei University of Technology, Tamkang University, National Institute of Technology Meghalaya

Language: English

Topic: Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,645

Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China