Optimized relay placement to federate segments in wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Sookyoung Lee;Mohamed Younis

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland;Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Federating disjoint segments may be necessary in some applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The segments can be simply distinct WSNs that operate autonomously or partitions of a single WSN that has suffered a significant damage. Linking these segments is subject to varying distances among segments which may be longer than twice the communication range of a relay node. In this work, we focus on designing an effective approach for federating these segments by populating the least number of relay nodes. The deployment area is modeled as a grid with equal-sized cells. The optimization problem is then mapped to selecting the fewest count of cells to populate relay nodes such that all segments are connected. Finding the optimal number and positions of relay nodes with respect to length between segments is NP-hard and heuristics are thus pursued. We propose a distributed Cell-based Optimized Relay node Placement (CORP) algorithm and explain the beneficial aspects of the resulting topology with respect to connectivity, and traffic balance. The performance of CORP is validated through extensive simulation experiments.