Hop-constrained relay node placement in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Placing relay nodes in wireless sensor networks is a widely-used approach to construct connected network topology. Previous works mainly focus on the relay node minimization while achieving network connectivity but pay less attention on the path performance guarantee. In this paper we first investigate the hop-constrained relay node placement optimization which aims at using as few relays as possible to construct sensor-to-sink paths meeting the hop constraint given by the end user. We present a heuristic-based algorithm to solve the above optimization problem and evaluate its performance by extensive simulation. The experimental results demonstrate that the efficiency of our designs in comparison with two baselines.