Achieving evenly distributed sensor lifetime in large scale wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In certain large scale wireless sensor networks, massive tiny sensors are deployed in a big area. For systems at this scale, it is difficult to setup sensors individually. In other words, a higher system level approach is required to perform sensor deployment and study overall energy consumption. Sensors need to be produced, configured, deployed, maintained, analyzed, and replenished as groups. One approach is to separate out the data forwarding job to routers. In this paper we complete our previous work on deploying the routers such that they wear out with a uniformed distribution. It is a simple deployment method where the density is simply based on the size of the area whose data will be relayed by these nodes. Without routing work, sensors will then also wear out with a uniformed distribution. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to show that our deployment approach can dramatically extend the lifetime of the network while maintain a low router-sensor ratio and an even power consumption rate of both the sensors and routers.