AbstractsComputer Science

Wireless sensor networks with randomly deployed nodes are becoming increasingly viable for several applications. The nodes in these networks communicate wirelessly. Most models for wireless sensor networks have used homogeneous nodes with the same communication range. These networks have symmetric connectivity, which makes them easier to analyze using percolation models. It is well-known that heterogeneous networks, where each node can customize its transmission radius, potentially provide many advantages. However, devising algorithms for such reconfiguration has proved to be difficult. Scalability requires that any configuration process be completely distributed, which presents the classic problem confronting all self-organized systems: How to obtain global optimality from local adaptation. We present a heuristic for the self-organization of heterogeneous networks with the explicit goal of producing robust networks that minimize energy consumption. The results show that the heuristic networks are both effective and efficient than the homogeneous networks in all the measures considered.