Energy Efficiency and QoS Enhancement for Wireless Sensor Networks with Applications to Long-Narrow Structures

There is a class of special environments, such as roads, mines tunnels, rivers, bridges, and pipelines, whose geographical shapes are long-narrow for several hundred meters. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) can be applied to monitor these environments. Long-narrow structure makes the WSN face plenty of challenges, such as unbalanced energy consumption and data aggregation. This paper proposes a nonuniform symmetric cluster model (NUSCM) using reasonable coverage routing controlling. The NUSCM consists of two base stations, sensor node clusters (SNCs) and transmission node clusters (TNCs), which can make the sensor networks be scalable to cover various long-narrow structures. Hierarchical nodes spacing and routing strategy of NUSCM are addressed. Furthermore, we simulate the proposed NUSCM, in comparison with the nonuniform deployment with two base stations (NUD-TBS) and uniform deployment with two base stations (UD-TBS). Research results indicate that the NUSCM and NUD-TBS have the same energy efficiency, which are better than that of UD-TBS. Moreover, NUSCM is superior to the UD-TBS and NUD-TBS in the link communication load and network survivability.