Node Deployment Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) which consist of a group of cheap but energy-limited nodes with functionalities of sensing, computation, and communication, are widely applied to detect or monitor the events in interest. One of the fundamental design issues in WSNs is how to deploy or relocate the nodes to optimize the desired sensing performance. This survey focuses on a variety of sensing performance models and movement-assisted node deployment approaches that have been studied and proposed in the literature and highlights their strengths and limitations. On one hand, this tutorial proposes an exhaustive classification of existing movement-assisted self-deployment algorithms. On the other hand, some physical constraints and their impacts, such as limited-battery and obstacles are introduced in this tutorial. Then, the detailed comparisons between the existing algorithms with respect to different scenarios are well performed in this tutorial. Therefore, this paper provides not only a view of the state-of-the-art but also the insights for selecting the appropriate self-deployment algorithms for different sensing scenarios. Furthermore, the open problems and challenges in the area of node deployment are summarized at the end of this tutorial.