UC Irvine

We study a wireless ad-hoc sensor network (WASN) where $N$ sensors gather data from the surrounding environment and transmit their sensed information to $M$ fusion centers (FCs) via multi-hop wireless communications. This node deployment problem is formulated as an optimization problem to make a trade-off between the sensing uncertainty and energy consumption of the network. Our primary goal is to find an optimal deployment of sensors and FCs to minimize a Lagrange combination of the sensing uncertainty and energy consumption. To support arbitrary routing protocols in WASNs, the routing-dependent necessary conditions for the optimal deployment are explored. Based on these necessary conditions, we propose a routing-aware Lloyd algorithm to optimize node deployment. Simulation results show that, on average, the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing deployment algorithms.