Maximizing network lifetime via 3G gateway assignment in dual-radio sensor networks

In this paper we consider a sensor network deployed far away from the base station. Each sensor in the network is equipped with two radio interfaces: the low-power IEEE 802.15.4 radio and the high-bandwidth 3G radio. The low-power radios are used on all sensors to transmit data within the network, while the high-bandwidth radios are activated only on a subset of sensors, referred to as gateways, for sending data to the base station. We assume that not all sensors are required to transmit their sensed data to the base station, yet the base station does have a network throughput requirement. A high throughput requirement would cause more energy consumption on sensors and shorten the network lifetime. We investigate the problem of maximizing the network lifetime subject to the network throughput being guaranteed and the data delivery latency from the network to the base station being bounded. We first formulate a novel optimization problem, namely, the throughput guaranteed network lifetime maximization problem. We then devise a heuristic for it, with the key ingredients of gateway assignment technique and energy-efficient routing forest establishment strategy. We finally conduct extensive experiments through simulation to evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristic and show that it outperforms another two algorithms in terms of network lifetime.