UC Irvine

We study a heterogeneous wireless sensor network (WSN) where N heterogeneous access points (APs) gather data from densely deployed sensors and transmit their sensed information to M heterogeneous fusion centers (FCs) via multi-hop wireless communication. This heterogeneous node deployment problem is modeled as an optimization problem with total wireless communication power consumption of the network as its objective function. We consider both static WSNs, where nodes retain their deployed position, and mobile WSNs where nodes can move from their initial deployment to their optimal locations. Based on the derived necessary conditions for the optimal node deployment in static WSNs, we propose an iterative algorithm to deploy nodes. In addition, we study the necessary conditions of the optimal movement-efficient node deployment in mobile WSNs with constrained movement energy, and present iterative algorithms to find such deployments, accordingly. Simulation results show that our proposed node deployment algorithms outperform the existing methods in the literature, and achieves a lower total wireless communication power in both static and mobile WSNs, on average.