Multiple Sink and Relay Placement in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are subject to failures. Deployment planning should ensure that when a sink or sensor node fails, the remaining network can still be connected, and so may require placing multiple sinks and relay nodes in addition to sensors. For network performance requirements, there may also be path-length constraints for each sensor node. We propose two local search algorithms, GRASP-MSP and GRASP-MSRP, to solve the problem of multiple sink placement and the problem of multiple sink and relay placement, respectively. GRASP-MSP minimises the deployment cost, while ensuring that each sensor node in the network is double-covered, i.e. it has two length-constrained paths to two sinks. GRASP-MSRP deploys sinks and relays to minimise the deployment cost and to guarantee that all sensor nodes in the network are doublecovered and noncritical. A sensor node is noncritical if upon its removal, all remaining sensor nodes still have length-constrained paths to sinks. We evaluate the algorithms empirically and show that both GRASP-MSP and GRASP-MSRP outperform the closely-related algorithms from the literature for the lowest total deployment cost.