Impact of Gateway Placement and Energy Consumption for Data Processing on Lifetime of IoT Networks

The network lifetime has been considered as one of the key parameters in IoT networks. Energy consumption of sensor nodes is a major concern in maximizing the network lifetime where not only data transmission but also data processing consume energy. In this article, maximum lifetime routing (MLR) in an IoT network is formulated as a linear optimization problem that, in addition to energy dissipation of data transmission, includes energy consumption for data processing. Optimization results reveal that the placement of the gateway has a significant impact on the network lifetime. Compared to placing the gateway at the geographical center, the network lifetime increases by almost 36% if the gateway is in the optimal location. Numerical results of the network lifetime also quantify the impact of energy consumption for data processing. Compared with the MLR problem without considering data processing, the network lifetime can decrease as much as 40% when energy consumption for data transmission and data processing units are equal (E
_elec
= E
_pro
). This work could be applied to facilitate the field of wireless network planning.