Towards prolonged lifetime for deployed WSNs in outdoor environment monitoring

Recently, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) emerged as a powerful and cost-efficient solution for unattended Outdoor Environment Monitoring (OEM) applications. These applications impose certain challenges on WSN deployment, including 3-Dimensional (3-D) settings, harsh operational conditions, and limited energy resources. To prolong lifetime of the deployed WSN, while mitigating the effects of these challenges, we propose the use of Relay Nodes (RNs) in addition to Sensor Nodes (SNs) in a distributed manner. While RNs facilitate reaching distant destinations, SNs can reserve their limited energy resources for sensing and data gathering. In addition, Mobile RNs (MRNs), which is a set of RNs capable of being reallocated (i.e. mobilized) at any point within the network lifetime, can be used to overcome possible link/node failure caused by the harsh conditions. It can also guarantee minimal energy consumption through imposing a balanced traffic distribution. This article proposes a 3-D grid-based deployment for heterogeneous WSNs (consisting of SNs, RNs, and MRNs). The problem is cast as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the network lifetime while maintaining certain levels of fault-tolerance and cost-efficiency. Moreover, an Upper Bound (UB) on the deployed WSN lifetime, given that there are no unexpected node/link failures, has been driven. Based on practical/harsh experimental settings in OEM, intensive simulations show that the proposed grid-based deployment scheme can achieve an average of the expected UB.