Enhancement of wireless sensor network lifetime by deploying heterogeneous nodes

Energy is one of the scarcest resources in wireless sensor network (WSN). One fundamental way of conserving energy is judicious deployment of sensor nodes within the network area so that energy flow remains balanced throughout the network. This avoids the problem of occurrence of 'energy holes' and ensures prolonged network lifetime. We have first investigated the problem for enhancing network lifetime using homogeneous sensor nodes. From our observation it is revealed that energy imbalance in WSN occurs due to relaying of data from different parts of the network towards sink. So for improved energy balance instead of using only sensor nodes it is desirable to deploy relay nodes in addition to sensor nodes to manage such imbalance. We have also developed a location-wise pre-determined heterogeneous node deployment strategy based on the principle of energy balancing derived from this analysis, leading to an enhancement of network lifetime. Exhaustive simulation is performed primarily to measure the extent of achieving our design goal of enhancing network lifetime while attaining energy balancing and maintaining coverage. The simulation results also show that our scheme does not compromise with other network performance metrics such as end-to-end delay, packet loss, throughput while achieving the design goal. Finally all the results are compared with two competing schemes and the results confirm our scheme's supremacy in terms of both design performance metrics as well as network performance metrics.