Positioning of Relay Stations in Wireless Sensor Networks
Abstract
A sensor is a device which can detect or measure a physical property and which records, indicates, or otherwise responds to the signal received. A wireless sensor in a network can communicate with the sensors located within its transmission range. In this paper, the capacity enhancement problem by adding a relay station to the sensor network was studied which can result in efficient and scalable design. Major concerns of the wireless sensors addressed in this paper are reducing the number of hops a message needs to make from one sensor to a different sensor before it reaches the base station, restraining the number of relay stations necessary for covering the desired percentage of sensor nodes.
In this paper, the positions for the relay stations are first selected in a specific pattern such that with this initial distribution, every sensor is in reach of at least one relay station. Then priorities are given to the relay stations based on two different methods. The relay stations with low priorities are removed from the list of positions for a relay station. In this way the positions for the relay stations are eliminated until the percentage of number of sensors covered by relay stations falls beyond some number which is varied in the experiments done.