Deploying Two-Tiered Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks Supporting In-Network Computation

The centralized computing model in traditional Wireless Sensor/Actuator Networks (WSANs) can lead to large delays and unbalances, which severely restricts the adoption of WSANs in applications requiring high network performance. To address this limitation, the in-network computation model has been proposed, in which the computation capability is distributed among wireless nodes in WSANs, i.e., wireless nodes perform not only data communication but also data processing. Node placement is a primary step to build the underlaying topologies of WSANs. Nevertheless, the problem of node placement to design underlaying network topologies supporting in-network computation is still unexplored. To this end, we propose an In-network-oriented Node Placement Algorithm (INPA) to build WSANs supporting in-network computation. Moreover, we investigate the time complexity of INPA and verify the efficiency of INPA through extensive simulations.