Lifetime enhancement of wireless sensor networks by avoiding energy-holes with Gaussian distribution

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are receiving significant attention due to their potential applications in environmental monitoring and surveillance domains. In WSNs, preserving energy requires utmost attention, as they are highly resource constrained. One fundamental way of conserving energy is judicious deployment of nodes within the network for balancing energy flow throughout the network. Node deployment using Gaussian distribution is a standard practice and is widely acceptable when random deployment is used. Initially, an analysis is done to establish that Gaussian distribution based node deployment is not energy balanced. Standard deviation of Gaussian distribution is identified as the parameter responsible for energy balancing. A deployment strategy is proposed for energy balancing using customized Gaussian distribution by discretizing the standard deviation. Performance of the scheme is evaluated in terms of energy balance and network lifetime. Exhaustive simulation is performed to measure the extent of achieving our design goal of enhancing network lifetime while attaining energy balancing. The simulation results show that our scheme also provides satisfactory network performance in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput. Finally, all the results are compared with three competing schemes and the results confirm our scheme’s supremacy in terms of both design performance metrics as well as network performance metrics.