  To cover a set of targets with known locations within an area with limited or
prohibited ground access using a wireless sensor network, one approach is to
deploy the sensors remotely, from an aircraft. In this approach, the lack of
precise sensor placement is compensated by redundant de-ployment of sensor
nodes. This redundancy can also be used for extending the lifetime of the
network, if a proper scheduling mechanism is available for scheduling the
active and sleep times of sensor nodes in such a way that each node is in
active mode only if it is required to. In this pa-per, we propose an efficient
scheduling method based on learning automata and we called it LAML, in which
each node is equipped with a learning automaton, which helps the node to select
its proper state (active or sleep), at any given time. To study the performance
of the proposed method, computer simulations are conducted. Results of these
simulations show that the pro-posed scheduling method can better prolong the
lifetime of the network in comparison to similar existing method.
