An Energy-Efficient Node Deployment Strategy for Energy Harvesting-aided Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to the limited battery capacity, energy is the most crucial constraint for improving the performance of widely adopted Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Hence, conserving energy and improving the energy efficiency are important in designing a sustainable WSN. In this article, by taking the advantages of the emerging energy harvest techniques, we introduce a novel energy-efficient hierarchical two-tier (HTT) energy harvesting-aided WSNs deployment scenario. In our design, two types of nodes are adopted: one is the regular battery-powered sensor node (RSN), and the other is the energy harvesting-aided data relaying node (EHN). The objective is to use only RSNs to monitor FoI, while EHNs focus on collecting the sensed data from RSNs and forwarding the gathered data to the data sink. The minimum number of EHNs is deployed based on a newly designed probability density function to minimize the energy consumption of RSNs. This, in turn, extends the lifetime of the deployed WSN. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme outperforms some well-known techniques in the network lifetime, while enhancing the total throughput.