Abstract: Deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has drawn much attention in
recent years. Given the limited energy for sensor nodes, it is critical to implement WSNs
with energy efficiency designs. Sensing coverage in networks, on the other hand, may
degrade gradually over time after WSNs are activated. For mission-critical applications,
therefore, energy-efficient coverage control should be taken into consideration to support
the quality of service (QoS) of WSNs. Usually, coverage-controlling strategies present
some challenging problems: (1) resolving the conflicts while determining which nodes
should be turned off to conserve energy; (2) designing an optimal wake-up scheme that
avoids awakening more nodes than necessary. In this paper, we implement an energyefficient
coverage control in cluster-based WSNs using a Memetic Algorithm (MA)-based
approach, entitled CoCMA, to resolve the challenging problems. The CoCMA contains
two optimization strategies: a MA-based schedule for sensor nodes and a wake-up scheme,
which are responsible to prolong the network lifetime while maintaining coverage
preservation. The MA-based schedule is applied to a given WSN to avoid unnecessary
energy consumption caused by the redundant nodes. During the network operation, the
wake-up scheme awakens sleeping sensor nodes to recover coverage hole caused by dead