Impact of base station location on wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted much attention in recent years due to their potential use in many applications such as surveillance, militant etc. Given the importance of such applications, maintaining a dependable operation of the network is a fundamental objective. In Wireless Sensor Networks, many algorithms have been devised to improve energy maintenance in a whole network. Most of them assume the location of the Base Station (BS) to be at the border of the network even though location of Base Station takes some role in overall performance of the network. So in this paper, we simulated WSN performance in energy consumption, throughput, packets delivery ratio and delay with different locations of BS. Simulation results showed the best performance when a Base Station is located in the center of the WSN field and the worst when a Base Station is in the corner of the WSN. Compared to the existing location assumption, with the best positioned BS, Cluster Heads consumed 69% and with the worst positioned BS, they consumed 127% in energy. When we build WSN, if we spend some higher cost for installing BS inside the network, its overall performance can be improved much.