In this paper, we propose a novel idea of maintaining connectivity by introducing relay sensors in a wireless sensor network. We restrict our consideration to a very important class of wireless sensor networks such as biomedical sensor networks [13] , in which the locations of the sensors are fixed and the placement can be pre-determined. We formulate our problem to the NP-hard network optimization problem named [5] and present two approximate solutions. Meanwhile, we study the topology improvement in a wireless sensor network when relay sensors are introduced. In other words, we restrict transmission power of each sensor to a small value and use relay sensors to guarantee connectivity. The performance parameters under consideration are P, the total per node minimum power needed to maintain connectivity, and D, the maximum degree in the minimum power topology (maintained by P). Simulation study shows that with the introduction of relay sensors, we achieve better performance, especially for sparse topology.
The work in REF studies the placement of relaying nodes in a sensor network to maintain global connectivity.
Relay sensor placement in wireless sensor networks
Wireless Networks
Computer Science