Prolonging Network Lifetime via Partially Controlled Node Deployment and Adaptive Data Propagation in WSN

In large scale wireless sensor networks, maximizing the network lifetime under energy constraint is one of the most critical tasks. In this paper we investigate how to maximize the wireless sensor network lifetime via joint relay deployment and adaptive data propagation. We consider wireless sensor networks with two types of nodes: sensors and relays. Sensor nodes will be deployed randomly under certain coverage constraint, and relay nodes will be deployed in a partially controlled way such that the network lifetime can be maximally extended. We formulate the joint relay deployment and adaptive data propagation problem into a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Since MINLP is NP-hard in general, in this paper we have proposed a greedy heuristic to attack this problem. The numerical results have demonstrated that significant network lifetime extension can be achieved if relay nodes can be deployed in an effective way. For example, when the proposed joint scheme is used, adding 10% extra relay nodes can extend the network lifetime by 50% further comparing to using adaptive data propagation solely for a large scale sensor network with 2000 nodes. We then conducted a set of simulations to verify the numerical results. Since some approximation has been made when solving the problem numerically, lifetime extension obtained by the numerical solution is slightly higher than the network lifetime extension obtained in the simulation. However, the network lifetime extension is still significant.