Sensor Deployment With Limited Communication Range in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

We study the heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and propose the necessary condition of the optimal sensor deployment. Similar to that in homogeneous WSNs, the necessary condition implies that every sensor node location should coincide with the centroid of its own optimal sensing region. Moreover, we discuss the dynamic sensor deployment in both the homogeneous and the heterogeneous WSNs with limited communication range for the sensor nodes. The purpose of sensor deployment is to improve sensing performance, reflected by distortion and coverage. We model the sensor deployment problem as a source coding problem with distortion reflecting sensing accuracy. However, when the communication range is limited, a WSN is divided into several disconnected sub-graphs under certain conditions as we will discuss in this paper. In such a scenario, neither the conventional distortion nor the coverage represents the sensing performance as the collected data in disconnected sub-graphs cannot be communicated with the access point. By defining an appropriate sensing performance measure, we propose a Restrained Lloyd (RL) algorithm and a deterministic annealing (DA) algorithm to optimize sensor deployment in both the homogeneous and heterogeneous WSNs. Our simulation results show that both the DA and the RL algorithms outperform the existing algorithms when communication range is limited.