Performance Analysis of Sensor Placement Strategies on a Wireless Sensor Network

The positioning of nodes in a sensor network has an effect in its performance. In this paper, two predefined configurations are compared to the random distribution to gauge the magnitude of the effect on energy consumption of each type of sensor allocation. The experiments assume a flat, obstacle free, rectangular field, with Directed Diffusion used as routing protocol, and random different positions for the querying entity (sink) and the event location in the field. The results confirm that in an environment such as this, it is worth investing in the uniform positioning of sensors as they offer a significant performance gain.