Power-Aware Node Deployment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted intense interest due to their extensible capability. In this paper, we attempt to answer a fundamental but practical question: how should we deploy these nodes. In most current designs, sensor nodes are randomly or uniformly distributed because of their simplicity. However, the node deployment has a great impact on the performance of WSNs. Instead of maintaining the coverage for some snapshots of a WSN, it is essential that we can provide a continuous coverage in the whole lifecycle of the WSN. We will exhibit the weakness of the uniform distribution by disclosing the fatal sink routing-hole problem. To address this problem, we propose a non-uniform, power-aware distribution scheme. Our analysis and simulation results show that the power-aware deployment scheme can significantly improve the long-term network connectivity and service quality.