Optimized relay placement for wireless sensor networks federation in environmental applications

Advances in sensing and wireless communication technologies have enabled a wide spectrum of Outdoor Environment Monitoring applications. In such applications, several wireless sensor network sectors tend to collaborate to achieve more sophisticated missions that require the existence of a communication backbone connecting (federating) different sectors. Federating these sectors is an intricate task because of the huge distances between them and because of the harsh operational conditions. A natural choice in defeating these challenges is to have multiple relay nodes (RNs) that provide vast coverage and sustain the network connectivity in harsh environments. However, these RNs are expensive; thus, the least possible number of such devices should be deployed. Furthermore, because of the harsh operational conditions in Outdoor Environment Monitoring applications, fault tolerance becomes crucial, which imposes further challenges; RNs should be deployed in such a way that tolerates failures in some links or nodes. In this paper, we propose two optimized relay placement strategies with the objective of federating disjoint wireless sensor network sectors with the maximum connectivity under a cost constraint on the total number of RNs to be deployed. The performance of the proposed approach is validated and assessed through extensive simulations and comparisons assuming practical considerations in outdoor environments. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.