Maximizing network lifetime in wireless sensor networks with regular topologies

Limited energy supply (battery-powered) is a crucial problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Sensor node placement schemes and routing protocols are mostly proposed to address this problem. In this paper, we first present how to place sensor nodes by use of a minimal number of them to maximize the coverage area when the communication radius of the sensor node is different from the sensing radius, which results in the application of regular topology to WSNs deployment. With nodes placed at an equal distance and equipped with an equal power supply, the problem of unbalanced energy consumption in 2-D regular topologies becomes more severe and much more difficult to tackle than that in 1-D chains, though the latter is known as an already quite hard problem. We address this problem and propose an adaptive data collection scheme by employing different communication radii for nodes in different locations to balance the energy consumption in WSNs. In order to achieve the ultimate goal of maximizing network lifetime in grid-based WSNs, we give a mathematical formulation, which shows the problem of maximizing network lifetime is a nonlinear programming problem and NP-hard even in the 1-D case. We discuss several heuristic solutions and show that the halving shift data collection scheme is the best solution among them. We also generalize the maximizing network lifetime problem to the randomly-deployed WSNs, which shows the significance of our mathematical formulation for this crucial problem in WSNs.