Effect of sink location and redundancy on multi‐sink wireless sensor networks: a capacity and delay analysis

Wireless network applications such as intelligent buildings and disaster relief operations use large‐scale platforms. In these networks using multiple sinks reduce packet loss. However, finding the optimum locations for the sinks has not been fully studied yet. Therefore, the authors sought to investigate whether the location of sinks can affect network parameters, such as capacity and delay. In this study, two schemes named popular‐location scheme and random scheme are designed based on sink location. In the popular‐location scheme, the sinks (base stations) are located around the popular points (most visited locations) according to the location popularity rule. However, in the random scheme, sinks are distributed randomly. The authors considered a cell‐partitioned network to manage the signal interference between cells. The authors' results demonstrated that there is a trade‐off between capacity and delay in both schemes. Additionally, the effect of packet redundancy on capacity and delay was investigated. Furthermore, by utilising the popularity rule, the network capacity and average delay improved significantly. Moreover, the authors' results indicate that packet redundancy does not affect the capacity, but it improves the delay.