Energy Efficient Node Re-positioning Algorithm for Uniform node Distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks

Modelling of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be addressed from various aspects, such as energy efficiency, scalability, fault tolerance and network lifetime. Most of the algorithms proposed in literature which address these aspects assume uniform distribution of nodes in the area under consideration (AUC). However, in real life random deployment of nodes is done in the presence of geographical constraints posed by these networks along with limitations of cost & time. In order to ascertain efficient utilization of the proposed algorithms in literature, a method which repositions the nodes to obtain uniform distribution in the given AUC is required. The present work proposes energy efficient molecule equilibrium (EEME) based decentralized algorithm to reposition the sensor nodes (SNs) uniformly which are randomly distributed at the time of network initialization. In the proposed method, the SNs are assumed to be mobile and are proposed to move cautiously so as to minimize the energy consumption incurred due to repositioning of nodes. The performance of algorithm after its simulation has been compared with state-of the-art node repositioning algorithms for WSNs. The results show that the proposed repositioning algorithm outperforms the compared methods in terms of energy consumption, uniformity, coverage and average distance covered by nodes.