Area coverage protocols aim at turning off redundant sensor nodes while ensuring full coverage of the area by the remaining active nodes. Connectivity of the active nodes subset must also be provided so that monitoring reports can reach the sink stations. Existing solutions hardly address these two issues as a unified one and very few are robust to non ideal physical conditions. In this paper, we propose a deep analysis and some enhancements of a localized algorithm for area coverage, based on Surface Coverage Relays (SCR) and able to build connected active nodes sets that fully cover the area. We first enhanced the critical phase of our protocol (the relay selection) and show that the number of active nodes can be drastically reduced. We then raise the issue of the robustness of the protocol once a realistic physical layer is simulated. Our algorithm proved itself to be an interesting solution as it remained able to still ensure high coverage level under realistic physical layer conditions. We also added the possibility to finely tune the overall proportion of active nodes through a new parameter used during local relay selection phases.