Reachability Analysis for spatial Deployment of Heterogenous Nodes in a WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks are taking a big step forward to productive deployments. Initially the Wireless Sensor Networks consisted of homogeneous deployment of identical nodes.. With the passage of time the heterogeneous networks have also come into existence. Less attention has been paid to the heterogeneous deployment of sensors and the amount of research work done with heterogeneous networks is still very less as compared to homogeneous networks. For ensuring reliable data communication among nodes of different capabilities in a heterogeneous network we have focused on the broadcast reachability of the sensor nodes to assure that any type of node (weaker/stronger) is within the transmission range of any other type of node keeping in mind, the asymmetric links among nodes in a heterogeneous network. Broadcasting is one of the fundamental data dissemination mechanisms in mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we have considered deployment of sensing nodes of heterogeneous capabilities in a threedimensional region and it is observed that a few strong sensor nodes can reduce the total requirement of sensor nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network. This observation is supported by mathematical analysis.