On Identifying Optimal Shortcut Edge Locations in a Linear Small-World Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of power-constrained sensor nodes deployed for various data collection operations in real-world settings. The WSN nodes collect real-time data and send it to a data processing unit (DPU) for in-depth analysis of the collected data with multihop relaying. For sparsely deployed WSNs, data collected from nodes many hops away from the DPU suffer significant delays, thus making such deployments unsuitable for delay-critical applications. However, adding shortcut edges (SEs) directly to the DPU can alleviate the end-to-end transmission delay by incorporating small-world properties. In this paper, we analytically find the optimal locations of a few SEs on a finite-sized linear WSN. Moreover, we also characterize the associated tradeoff in transmit power for using these SEs in the existing linear WSN.