Improving Connectivity via Relays Deployment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Enhancing the connectivity of wireless sensor networks is necessary to avoid the occurrence of coverage gaps. In this paper, we aim at improving the network connectivity of a given network by adding a set of relays to it. We characterize the network connectivity by the Fiedler value, which is the second smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix representing the network graph. We propose a network-maintenance algorithm, which finds the best locations for a given set of relays. The proposed algorithm obtains the best relays´ locations through a multi-level approach. In each level, the search problem can be formulated as a standard semi-definite programming (SDP) optimization problem. We show that the proposed algorithm can increase the average Fiedler value by 35% by adding one relay only.