Data capacity improvement of wireless sensor networks using non-uniform sensor distribution

Energy conservation is an important design consideration for battery powered wireless sensor networks (WSNET). Energy constraint in WSNETs limits the total amount of sensed data (data capacity) received by sinks. In the commonly used static model of sensor networks with uniformly distributed homogenous sensors with a stationary sink sensors close to the sink drain their energy much faster than sensors far away from the sink due to the unevenly distributed forwarding workloads among sensors. A major issue, which has not been adequately addressed so far, is the question of how sensor deployment governs the data capacity, and how to improve data capacity of WSNETs. In our previous work we provided a simple analytical model to address this issue for one specific type of WSNETs. In this paper, we extend our previous work to address this issue for general WSNETs. In the extended static models, for large networks, we find that after the lifetime of a sensor network is over, there is a great amount of energy left unused, which can be up to 90% of the total initial energy. Thus, the static models with uniformly distributed homogenous sensors cannot effectively utilize their energy. This energy waste implies that the potential data capacity is much larger than the capacity achieved in these static models. To increase the total data capacity we propose a non-uniform sensor distribution strategy. Simulation results show that, for large, dense WSNETs, the non-uniform sensor distribution strategy can increase the total data capacity by an order of magnitude.