Prolonging the Lifetime of Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks via Base Station Placement

Network lifetime is a critical design goal of any battery operated large scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we investigate how to prolong the lifetime of large scale WSNs via optimal placement of base stations (BSs). With multiple BSs placed, the sensor nodes can send their data to nearby sinks and may reduce energy consumption of relaying packets for other sensor nodes. Due to the high cost of BSs and geographical constraints in WSNs, we can only place a limited number of BSs in a few candidate locations. Considering wireless transmission features and flow routing, we formulate this base station placement (BSP) problem in WSNs into a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. In view of the NP-hardness of the formulated problem, we develop the heuristic algorithm to pursue feasible solutions. Through extensive simulations, we show that the solutions found by the proposed algorithm are close to the optimal one and the proposed scheme is effective in prolonging the lifetime of large scale WSNs.