A practical approach to deploy large scale wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network, a sensor measures environmental data. It also relays data for other sensors. While sensing workload is the same among sensors, relaying workload differs. Sensors closer to the data sink carry more data traffic. This becomes more prominent as the network scales up. The drawback of this is that nodes in the network degrade unevenly and the network ages in a non-uniform way. This paper seeks the ways to deploy the network so that the workload is evenly distributed, thus the network overall behavior degrades in a smooth fashion. Assuming that the sensors should be evenly deployed within the monitored area, we look at the approach where a set of more powerful nodes are designated for data relaying. We look at the approach to deploy relaying nodes that are easy to implement in practice. In particular, we select sub-regions to deploy relaying nodes at calculated density. We propose a simple method where the density is simply based on the size of the area whose data is relayed by these nodes