A Location-Wise Predetermined Deployment for Optimizing Lifetime in Visual Sensor Networks

Visual sensor networks are receiving significant attention due to their potential applications ranging from surveillance to tracking domains. Nevertheless, due to the funneling effect, the unbalanced energy usage among visual sensor nodes (SNs) increases and leads to premature decrease in network lifetime. First, considering Rayleigh fading channel and routing models, we analyze the optimization of network lifetime by balancing the energy consumption among different SNs. From the analysis, it is revealed that the number of SNs and relay nodes and their locations have significant influence on limiting the energy hole problem and optimization of network lifetime. Based on the derived principle of energy balancing, we develop a heterogeneous SNs deployment strategy leading to optimization in network lifetime. Exhaustive simulation is performed, primarily to measure the extent of achieving our design goal of optimizing network lifetime while attaining energy balancing. We also measure the effect of placement errors on the performance and robustness of the scheme. The results show that even in the presence of placement error the performance is comparable and provides better robustness compared with the competing scheme. Further, the simulation results show that our scheme does not compromise with other performance metrics, e.g., end-to-end delay and throughput, while achieving the design goal. Finally, all the comparative results confirm our scheme's supremacy over the competing schemes.