Deployment guidelines for achieving maximum lifetime and avoiding energy holes in sensor network

The demand for maximum network lifetime in many mission-critical applications of wireless sensor networks motivates the great significance to deploy as few sensors as possible to achieve the expected network performance. In this paper, we first characterize the energy consumption of wireless sensor networks with adjustable transmission ranges through theoretical analysis. Based on this result, we propose a deployment strategy with T as the required minimum network lifetime. We come up with three interventions: (A) in order to achieve an evenly balanced energy consumption among all nodes, the node density in different areas of the network should be a continuous varying function of the distance from the sink; (B) if there are insufficient nodes to achieve a balanced energy consumption over the whole network, our proposed node deployment strategy can be used to achieve the required lifetime threshold T with minimum number of nodes; and (C) when there are sufficient nodes to ensure the network connectivity and coverage with the node density of τ, we design an algorithm to identify the optimal transmission radius r and the corresponding achievable maximum network lifetime. Our conclusions are verified by extensive simulation results.