Wireless Sensor Network has attracted a lot of attentions due to its broad applications in recent years and also introduces
many challenges. Network lifetime is a critical issue in Wireless Sensor Networks. It is possible to extend network lifetime
by organizing the sensors into a number of sensor covers. However, with the limited bandwidth, coverage breach (i.e, targets
that are not covered) can occur if the number of available time-slots/channels is less than the number of sensors in a sensor
cover. In this paper, we study a joint optimization problem in which the objective is to minimize the coverage breach as well
as to maximize the network lifetime. We show a “trade-off” scheme by presenting two strongly related models, which aim to
tradeoffs between the two conflicting objectives. The main approach of our models is organizing sensors into non-disjoint
sets, which is different from the current most popular approach and can gain longer network lifetime as well as less coverage
breach. We proposed two algorithms for the first model based on linear programming and greedy techniques, respectively. Then
we transform these algorithms to solve the second model by revealing the strong connection between the models. Through numerical
simulation, we showed the good performance of our algorithms and the pictures of the tradeoff scheme in variant scenarios,
which coincide with theoretical analysis very well. It is also showed that our algorithms could obtain less breach rate than
the one proposed in (Cheng et al. in INFOCOM’ 05, 2005).