Positioning of Base Stations in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have attracted much attention in recent years due to their potential use in many applications such as border protection and combat field surveillance. Given the criticality of such applications, maintaining a dependable operation of the network is a fundamental objective. However, the resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes and the ad hoc formation of the network, often coupled with an unattended deployment, pose non-conventional challenges and motivate the need for special techniques for dependable design and management of WSN. In this article, we highlight the potential of careful positioning of the base station (BS), which acts as a sink node for the collected data, as a viable means for increasing the dependability of WSN. We categorize published work on optimal positioning of BS in WSN. Referring to such work as static positioning, we further introduce dynamic schemes that reposition the BS during the network operation. We show that dynamic BS positioning can be very effective in optimizing the network functional and non-functional performance objectives and in coping with dynamic changes in the environment and available network resources