Addressing WSN Deployments Over Obstacle Clad- Irregular Terrains

Shekhar Tyagi, Abhishek Srivastava

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are majorly employed for real time data collection and monitoring, particularly in scenarios characterized by environments that are harsh for direct human involvement. Optimised deployment of WSN nodes is a long standing issue and several ideas have been proposed to address this. Existing deployment strategies are mostly based on the assumption that the terrain for deployment of nodes is perfectly regular. This is an impractical assumption and in this paper we address this gap by proposing a deployment strategy for WSN nodes over irregular terrains. Such terrains comprise uneven elevations, morphology and vegetation based obstacles, rocky obstacles and so on. Our approach comprises extraction of satellite images of the Region of Interest (RoI) from Google Earth and generating a KML file (Keyhole Markup File) for the RoI containing the latitude, longitude, and elevation values of each and every point in the RoI. These points are used to generate a contour map of the RoI containing detailed terrain morphology. A radio frequency path loss model in combination with an advanced Inverse Distance Weighted (IDW)-Interpolation technique is proposed that ensures connectivity and coverage in such irregular terrains with varying nature of obstacles. The technique effectively detects occlusions and enables effective deployment. The approach is compared with existing deployment techniques over simulated irregular settings and the results validate its efficacy.

External IDs:dblp:conf/icwe/TyagiS24