Relay node placement for building wireless sensor networks with reconfigurability provision

Abstract Intelligent manufacturing needs the flexible and reconfigurable manufacturing systems to respond to dynamic market demands rapidly, which requires the underlying information systems (e.g., industrial wireless sensor networks) to provide reconfigurability. The Relay Node Placement (RNP) problem has aroused great attention due to its significant influence on network performance. However, existing works assume that the network configurations (e.g., transmit power, delay and reliability requirements) are fixed, and therefore cannot guarantee the reconfigurability of the deployed Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). To this end, this paper studies the RNP problem with reconfigurability provision. We propose an RNP framework with supporting network reconfiguration, and we also prove that this framework can ensure a deterministic approximation ratio and a tight time complexity. We also verify the efficiencies of the proposed algorithms through extensive simulations, and results show the superiorities of the proposed algorithms on deployment cost, end-to-end delay and reliability.