Routing-Aware Design of Indoor Wireless Sensor Networks Using an Interactive Tool

In this paper, we present an interactive design tool that can assist rapid prototyping and deployment of wireless sensor networks for building automation systems. We argue that it is possible to design networks that are more resilient to failures and have longer lifetime if the behavior of routing algorithms (RAs) is taken into account at design time. Resiliency can be increased by algorithmically adding redundancy to the network at locations where it can be maximally leveraged by RAs during operation. Lifetime can be increased by placing routers where they are most needed according to the expected data traffic patterns to improve the quality of the transmission. The network synthesis problem is formulated as an optimization problem. We propose a mixed-integer linear program to solve it exactly and a polynomial-time heuristic that returns close-to-optimal results in a shorter time. We analyze the performance of the designed networks by using OPNET simulation. Results show that our tool can assist in designing sensor networks that have high throughput and consume power efficiently.