On the design of heterogeneous sensor networks based on small world concepts

Data communication may have a strong impact on the design of a wireless sensor network (WSN) since the energy cost related to the data transmission is typically much higher than the energy cost to perform data processing. Typically, data communication in a WSN tends to be different from other "traditional" data networks such as the Internet. In a WSN, there is a special node called sink that is either the origin or the destination of a message whereas, in the other networks, data communication happens between arbitrary communicating entities. In this scenario, the latency and the energy consumption during communication between the sink node and the other nodes can be optimized using Heterogeneous Sensor Networks (HSNs) created by applying the small world concepts. In order to generate a network with small world features, one should add a small number of long-range links, called shortcuts, whose endpoints are equipped with more powerful hardware, mainly the energy resources. In this work, we propose and evaluate two small world models that can be used in the design of HSNs. In particular, the directed angulation toward the sink node model exhibits the most interesting tradeoff between energy consumption and latency and the sink node as source/destination model presents the best results related to energy consumption and latency in the nodes near to the sink.