Non-Uniform Node Deployment for Lifetime Extension in Large-Scale Randomly Distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Network sensing coverage and network lifetime are the two major performance metrics for WSNs. Different data forwarding/routing mechanisms lead to different amounts and different distributions of energy consumption in a network. Moreover, nodes at different locations will suffer from different message forwarding burdens, either due to the amounts of forwarding messages or due to the required transmission power. In this work, we focus on the node deployment problem for large-scale randomly distributed WSNs, and proposed a non-uniform node deployment strategy, the IFA-based deployment strategy, for the multi-hop routing scenario. The sensing coverage, message forwarding and energy consumption issues are well examined and taken into consideration in our proposed deployment strategy. The iterative algorithm that figures out the optimal node density distribution fitting to the energy consumption distribution has been devised. Simulation results show that the proposed IFA-based deployment strategy can significantly improve the sensing coverage performance of a WSN.