Optimal Sink Placement in Wireless Sensor Networks to Increase Network Performance

In traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a single sink or base station is used to gather data from the whole network which suffers some serious performance issues, like latency, congestion, network failure, etc. Deploying multiple sinks in WSNs can improve the network performance, but it increases sink deployment cost. In this paper, we propose distributed algorithms to find out the minimum number of sinks to be deployed and their optimal positions in the deployment region, while ensuring a certain latency and fault tolerance level. We have considered both deterministic and random sensor node deployment strategies. Simulations of the algorithms are carried out in ns-3 network simulator, which shows number of sinks varies inversely with transmission range of nodes and network latency; and it is linearly proportional to the fault tolerance level.