Self-organized sink placement in large-scale wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The deficient energy supplies of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) drives network designers to optimize energy consumption in various ways. Not only with regard to the energy issue but also with respect to system performance, we design a local search technique for sink placement in WSNs that tries to minimize the maximum worst-case delay and extend the lifetime of a WSN, simultaneously. Since it is not feasible for a sink to use global information, which especially applies to large-scale WSNs, we introduce a self-organized sink placement (SOSP) strategy that combines the advantages of our previous works [1] and [2]. The goal of this research is to provide a better sink placement strategy with a lower communication overhead. Avoiding the costly design of using nodes' location information, each sink sets up its own group by communicating to its n-hop distance neighbors. While keeping the locally optimal placement, SOSP exhibits a quality of the solutions with respect to communication overhead as well as computational effort that are better than previous solutions. To model and consequently control the worst-case delay of a given WSN we build upon the so-called sensor network calculus (a recent methodology first introduced in [3]).