Abstract: There are many redundant sensors in the wireless sensor networks where the sensors are randomly distributed, which will lead to much energy to be wasted.Focusing on this problem,a distributed energy-efficient redundant sensor scheduling(ERSS) algorithm is proposed.In order to save the network energy and prolong the network lifetime as much as possible,in the proposed algorithm,every sensor judges whether it is a redundant sensor or not by itself.In the network,only a necessary number of sensors keep working to maintain full coverage of the network,while the redundant sensors turn into sleep mode for energy saving.In the paper,the discrimination rule of redundant sensors is addressed.The calculation model is given and the decision making process is illustrated.Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms on saving the network energy and prolonging the network lifetime.