An Efficient Multi-constraint Relay Deployment Strategy for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

The relay node deployment for wireless sensor network has many application constraints, such as the energy efficiency, stable connectivity, survivability and low cost. This paper explores this problem for static wireless sensor network. An efficient multi-constraint deployment strategy is proposed to save the deployment cost by deploying minimal relay nodes in candidate locations, to improve network lifetime by minimizing the maximum energy consumption of the relay nodes, and to improve network reliability by meeting a preset reliability threshold of the wireless communication. In order, the proposed strategy covers (a) extraction of three-dimensional discrete deployment space by shortest path search, (b) reliability evaluation of wireless channel in three-dimensional environment with electromagnetic obstacle, (c) energy consumption model for wireless communication with retransmission mechanism, (d) integer linear program-based formulation optimizing the amount, locations and lifetime of deployed relay nodes under the constraints of network survivability and reliability. The comparative simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy can reduce the solution time to minutes while the solution time of the existing methods is in hours when deploying dozens of sensors, and the result of the proposed deployment strategy can use the same number or slightly more relay nodes to achieve the best network lifetime, but the proposed strategy is not recommended to optimize the network reliability. In short, the proposed deployment strategy can ease the efficiency bottleneck while maintaining or even improving the algorithm performance.