A relay node deployment strategy for energy-balance using a group Gaussian distribution

Energy is one of the limited resources in a wireless sensor network (WSN), which inevitably results in the energy-hole phenomenon. One of the effective solutions is to deploy a certain number of relay nodes to alleviate the traffic load of sensor nodes. In this paper, the authors focus on the problem of relay node deployment in a layered network. By utilising a set of Gaussian distributions with different deviations in each layer, termed as group Gaussian distribution (GGD), this paper proposes a new relay node deployment strategy to balance energy consumption. Moreover, the energy consumption of each node and the energy-balance condition are analysed. And then, the actual requisite number of relay nodes and the standard deviations of Gaussian distributions in each layer are obtained. Both the theoretical analysis and the simulation results prove that the proposed deployment strategy significantly outperforms other node deployment schemes.