Intelligent Estimation of Gateways Count for Reduced Data Latency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently gained increased attention due to their potential use in numerous civil and military applications. In many of these applications, resource-constrained sensors are deployed to probe their surroundings and report their findings to one or multiple gateway nodes. In large networks, many sensors get involved in data relaying making the data latency unacceptably high. Since the number of deployed gateways and their locations impact the operation of the network, one of the option for reducing the data collection delay is to employ many gateways and appropriately place them in close proximity to data sources. However, increasing the gateway count imposes high cost for the additional hardware resources and their deployment means, thus a tradeoff would be unavoidable. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for estimating the least number of gateways required for meeting some upper bound on data latency. In addition, we present a heuristic for finding best locations for these gateways. Validation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.