Wireless Sensor Network Design in Grid-Free Structure

Sensors are small devices with limited battery, sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities. When many of them work together to monitor remote or hostile environments, they form a wireless sensor network (WSN). Designing WSNs requires prioritizing long network lifetime and energy efficiency. There are four main WSN design issues that affect the equal distribution of energy loads among sensors to extend network lifetime: sensor locations, sensor activity schedules, sink places/routes and data routes. In addition, instead of grid-based placement of sensors and sinks, a grid-free structure that allows them to be positioned more flexibly according to environmental factors or specific application requirements will allow minimizing energy consumption and increasing network resilience. As a contribution to the extensive literature presented in this framework, a new conic model is proposed that targets mentioned WSN Design Problems without a grid structure. The solution of the model is obtained using a commercial solver. The performance of the conic model is demonstrated by comparing its results against the grid-based design and a random placement strategy. It is shown that the conic model provides more flexibility in application and the resulting network will have a longer lifetime compared to the networks found by grid based model and random placement strategy.