Coverage constrained non-uniform node deployment in wireless sensor networks for load balancing

Multi-hop wireless sensor networks with uniform node deployment, in general, suffers from uneven load distribution that finally creates an energy hole around the sink causing early failure of the network. However, it has been shown earlier that nearly balanced energy consumption can be achieved by utilizing non-uniform deterministic node distribution with increasing node density towards the sink. In this paper, a novel model is proposed for non-uniform deterministic node distribution that reduces the total number of nodes to be deployed over the area and the network traffic satisfying both coverage and load balancing criteria. Also, with random node distribution, a simple distributed algorithm is developed for nearly load-balanced data gathering. Performance comparison with earlier works by simulation shows that the proposed model performs better in terms of network lifetime, network traffic and packet drops.