Title: Diffusion-based approach to deploying wireless sensor networks

Authors: R. Machado, S. Tekinay, W. Zhang, G. Wang

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA. ' Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey. ' Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA

Abstract: An important objective of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to reliably sense data about the environment in which they are deployed. Reliability in WSNs has been widely studied in terms of providing reliable routing protocols for message dissemination and reliability of communication from sink to sensors. In this work, we define a reliability metric by the amount of data sensed by the network. In order to satisfy this reliability constraint, we propose a diffusion-based approach for a deployment pattern for the sensor nodes. We show that this deployment pattern achieves sufficient coverage and connectivity and requires lesser number of sensors than popular regular deployment patterns. We further obtain the bounds on establishing connectivity between nodes in the WSN and extend this analysis for heterogeneous WSNs.

Keywords: deployment patterns; diffusion; connectivity; WSNs; wireless sensor networks; wireless networks; WSN reliability; sensor nodes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2010.036197

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2010 Vol.8 No.3/4, pp.222 - 232

Received: 11 Sep 2009
Accepted: 22 Jan 2010
Published online: 27 Oct 2010 *

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