Energy-Balanced Deployment and Topology Control for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), nodes closer to the sink node have heavier traffic load for packet forwarding. The unbalanced power consumption among sensor nodes may cause network partition. This paper proposes efficient node placement and topology control protocols to balance the power consumption of sensor nodes. Firstly, a virtual tree topology is constructed based on Grid-based WSNs. Then two node placement techniques, namely Distance-based and Density-based deployment schemes are proposed to balance the power consumption of sensor nodes. Finally, extension of the proposed protocols are made from a Grid-based WSN to a randomly deployed WSN, making the developed energy-balanced schemes can be generally applied to randomly deployed WSNs. Simulation results reveal that the developed protocols can efficiently balance each sensor node’s power consumption and prolong the network lifetime in both Grid-based and randomly deployed WSNs. Keywords-Network deployment; topology control; wireless sensor networks (WSNs); energy balance.