Cost Efficient Node Placement in Wide Area Monitoring through Wireless Sensor Network to Reduce Data Transmission Energy

Application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in monitoring applications has gained importance nowadays due to their low cost and reliable communication features. Excess energy consumption and signal attenuation in wide area monitoring are two maj or issues that occurs during data transmission. In this work, a model area of dimension 100x100m
²
has been considered where the sensor nodes are distributed throughout for wide area data monitoring. Two design schemes based on peer to peer topology and mesh topology respectively have been considered to study the energy and signal related performance and cost benefits related to real time continuous wide area monitoring. In the first design scheme, the sensors uses high power module based long distance data transmission and communicates directly to the base station. In the second scheme, intermediate nodes are placed and low power modules are used to transmit data in multi-hop multi-path fashion. The results indicate that for wide area monitoring, subj ected to power decay due to presence of thick walls and metallic structure, the second scheme reduces the data transmission energy and reaps economic benefits when used over a long period of time.