A Lifetime Enhancing Node Deployment Strategy using Heterogeneous Nodes in WSNs for Coal Mine Monitoring

摘要

Continuous monitoring of the environment in coal mines is an important application area in wireless sensor networks. It is very essential to know the conditions that exist in coal mines for ensuring safe working inside the mines. Based on the characteristics of room-and-pillar mining technique and the requirements for mine safety monitoring, we propose a heterogeneous node deployment strategy. To obtain real time and comprehensive monitoring, nodes are deployed in some strategic locations of the underground coal mine. We claim that the strategic locations are chosen in such a way that the proposed deployment scheme ensures 1-coverage and 3-connectivity. The claim has been justified by supporting lemma and proof. The present work achieves enhanced network lifetime by ensuring efficient energy usage amongst the nodes thereby prolonging network lifetime. Further, exhaustive simulation is performed considering a realistic routing protocol to substantiate our claim of energy efficiency and subsequent enhancement of network lifetime. Finally the scheme is compared with two existing deployment schemes. The results confirm our scheme's supremacy over both the existing schemes in terms of the performance metrics such as energy efficiency and network lifetime.