Kumar's, Zipf 's and Other Laws: How to Structure an Optimum Large-Scale Wireless (Sensor) Network?

Networks with a very large number of nodes are known to suffer from scalability problems, influencing throughput, delay and other quality of service (QoS) parameters. Examples of such networks are cellular networks and recently emerged wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Cellular networks − often composed of several million of nodes − have mitigated the scalability problem by deploying a dense hierarchical and centralised infrastructure. WSNs − expected to be composed of several tens of thousands of nodes − will have to find a suitable deployment solution, trading performance against cost and energy consumption. Mainly applicable to WSNs, aims to give some fundamental indications on an optimum structuring approach for large-scale wireless networks, where optimality refers to various criteria to be exposed in the paper. To this end, various laws known from different domains will be invoked to draw knowledgable design guidelines. Optimum network structures are derived and discussed for a plethora of different scenarios.