Investigation of the Shielding Length on Yukawa System Crystallization in Mobile Sensor Network Applications

In modern information technology, mobile sensor networks (MSNs) play an important role in industrial or military applications, so sensor deployment is a key issue in MSN research. Based on wireless communication theory, hexagonal topology is known to provide the best field coverage, limited nodes, and minimal system cost. In the 2-D dusty plasma physical system, plasma particles are capable of forming a good hexagonal structure based on Yukawa system crystallization. Therefore, this strategy can be applied to node deployment algorithm in MSN applications. For this paper, we used a 2-D dusty plasma simulation in order to provide node deployment for a large sensor network, and, for better performance evaluations, adopted the Delaunay triangulation in order to determine adjacent particles of a given dust particle. Sensor deployment distributions and system performance were carefully examined by considering various values for the shielding length and the computation scale in simulations. Here, we discuss the influence of the shielding rule in Yukawa system crystallization on sensor deployment applications. Our results indicate that the algorithm leads to better field coverage with perfect hexagonal topology, good system uniformity, and lower energy consumption, and can be considered as an aid for fast deployment experiments when thousands of wireless sensors are required within a large-scale area.