Fault-Tolerant Relay Node Placement in Wireless Sensor Networks for Surveillance of Overhead Transmission Lines

Wireless sensor networks provide a promising technology to surveil overhead transmission lines in smart grid communication. However, a great challenge for researchers is proposed by adverse outdoor environments and essential requirements of strong as well as flexible smart grid communication. Specifically, nearly linear topology, limited energy, and tolerance for faults are entangled to make the surveillance system complex. Because of the need for deep understanding of system, significant efforts have been made in the past few years. We have proposed a fault-tolerance framework for surveillance of overhead transmission lines. In this paper, we follow the framework and further explore deployment problems systematically. Firstly, we present a fault-tolerance placement model. After analyzing the model, we identify the optimal placement for fault tolerance and then propose a placement algorithm with optimal deployment. An extensive experiment highlights some useful observations for design of the fault-tolerance system and demonstrates efficient fault tolerance for relay nodes. Numerical results show that the fault-tolerance ratio is improved by at least 6% compared to that of previous algorithms.