Provisioned sink placement in heterogeneous sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), consisting of many small low powered nodes, are applied into different scenarios. These nodes sense surrounding environments and deliver back collected data periodically or on-demand. The overall delay experienced in the delivery process is almost always proportional to the number of hops of data delivery paths. For time-critical applications, such delay is most desirable to be bounded. Most of existing works deploy additional relay nodes to shorten data delivery paths. In contrast, this paper introduces additional sinks such that each sensor can reach at least one sink in a bounded number of hops. Specifically, this paper formulates provisioned sink placement problem in senor networks composed by sensors of Heterogeneous wireless broadcast regions. Then the problem is proved to be NP-complete and subsequently one heuristic algorithm is presented to obtain approximate solutions.