Analysis of energy consumption and lifetime of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

The paper examines the performance as well as energy consumption Issues of a wireless sensor network providing periodic data from a sensing field to a remote receiver. The sensors are assumed to be randomly deployed. We distinguish between two types of sensor organizations, one with a single layer of identical sensors (homogeneous) and one with an additional overlay of fewer but more powerful sensors (heterogeneous). We formulate the energy consumption and study their estimated lifetime based on a clustering mechanism with varying parameters related to the sensing field, e.g., size, and distance. We quantify the optimal number of clusters based on our model and show how to allocate energy between different layers.