On efficient deployment of high-end sensors in large-scale heterogeneous WSNs

Many complex sensor network applications require the use of a large number of low-end sensors to achieve quality through quantity. Deploying a relatively small number of high-end sensors in the region to gather and forward sensor data to the base station is generally considered as an efficient and scalable way to facilitate the management and operation of large-scale sensor networks. The number and location of high-end sensors do not only affect the network deployment cost but also the total energy consumption for data communication. We investigate the problem of deploying a minimum set of high-end sensors to collect the measurements of all low-end sensors with a minimum amount of energy consumption. We propose a heuristic algorithm, Distance- and Connectivity-based Hsensor Deployment to solve this problem. The simulation results illustrate the performance superiority of the proposed algorithm in comparison with two greedy schemes.