Energy efficient hybrid wired-cum-wireless sensor network design

The broad range of wireless sensor network applications has been part of the exponential growth in wireless communications and related technological developments. As a result, the concern on energy efficient network designs is increasing as the energy consumption is becoming a global environment problem. Minimizing energy dissipation and maximizing network lifetime are among main factors, aiming for optimized designs which lead to green applications. In an industrial application, various energy efficient network configurations can be designed. One such robust configuration is a hybrid wired-cum-wireless sensor network that is composed of a wireless sensor network and a wired backbone, which are inter-connected via access points. In this paper, the joint problem of configuring a hybrid wired-cum-wireless sensor network, position-constrained cluster head location, sensor nodes allocation, and position-constrained access point placement is addressed. The design considers real wireless communication limitations in the industrial applications, optimum locations of access points and cluster heads, and hybrid transmission structure of the network with the objective of minimizing the network energy consumption and configuration cost. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model and solved with “BARON”. Numerical results show that the hybrid configuration is more energy effective than the wireless networks and leads to a longer lifetime at the expense of a more complex design.