UC Irvine

We study a heterogeneous Rayleigh fading wireless sensor network (WSN) in which sensor nodes surveil a field of interest and communicate their sensory data with base stations with the aid of access points as relays. With the goal of improving the energy efficiency of the network, we consider both large-scale and small-scale signal propagation effects in our system model and aim to optimize the node deployment as an effective measure to reduce the wireless communication power consumption of the WSN. We propose a new framework, in which hard deterministic connectivity constraints on communication links are replaced with realistic limitations on outage due to severe stochastic fading. We also consider a radio energy model that reflects the exponential dependence of the transmission power on the rate. We derive the necessary conditions for the optimal deployment that not only minimize the power consumption, but also guarantee all wireless links to have an outage probability below the given threshold. Our theoretical findings are accompanied by simulations that indicate significant performance gains compared to existing node deployment algorithms in the literature.