EACH: Efficient Deployment of Sensor Nodes and Arrangement of Cluster Heads in Hexagon-based WSNs

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor nodes (SNs) with sensing, computation and wireless communication capabilities. One of the major challenges in designing a well-connected WSN is the coverage of the sensing field, which are depends on various factors (e.g., the sensing model, network topology, and deployment strategy). There are, in general, two types of deployment methods in WSNs, which are random deployment and deterministic deployment. Random deployment of the sensor nodes can cause unbalanced traffic pattern in WSNs. That is, cluster heads (CHs) around the sink have larger load than those farther away from the sink. Hence, CHs close to the sink exhaust their energy earlier. To overcome this problem, we, for the first time, propose an Efficient deployment of sensor nodes and Arrangement of Cluster Heads in hexagon-based WSNs (called "EACH"). Simulation results validate our theoretical analysis and show that the EACH scheme achieves satisfactory coverage ratio, significantly balances the energy consumption among SNs, and extends network lifetime. The methodology can also be exploited to further analyze and compare deterministic deployment strategies.