Energy efficient sensor placement for tunnel wireless sensor network in underground mine

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are very important for monitoring underground mine safety. Aimed at the characteristics of structure of the tunnel in underground mine, the tunnel wireless sensor network (TWSN) is presented to monitor the tunnel's environment. Sensor placement scheme in TWSN has considerable impact on the network lifetime. In this paper, based on analysis of the energy consumption of nodes in TWSN, we developed an energy efficient senor placement (EESP) strategy for TWSN, which can minimize the average energy consumption of nodes and prolong the network lifetime. Simulation results show that EESP strategy for TWSN effectively decreases the average energy consumption of nodes and achieves an obvious improvement on the network lifetime compared with uniform sensor placement scheme.