A PDF Based Scale-Free Topology Construction Model for Wireless Sensor Networks

Network robustness in wireless sensor network (WSN) is an emerging area of research as sensor nodes (SNs) often fail due to limited energy resources, harsh environment, and proliferation of cyber-attacks. Therefore, the energy efficiency and robustness of SNs are the two critical issues that need to be addressed in WSNs. In this paper, we address the above mentioned issues in two phases. In the first phase, we propose an energy efficient SN deployment scheme for WSNs using non-uniform SN deployment scheme. In the second phase, we generate scale-free network topology in order to improve the robustness of WSN so that they can withstand failure issues due to cyber-attacks. For the construction of scale-free topology, we have considered various constraints of SNs viz., communication range, maximum degree, and network growth. This topology construction was proved to be very effective in providing robustness to WSN because of their heterogeneous degree distribution. The performance of the proposed work has been evaluated through simulation using Python 3.7.1 on Spyder 3.3.2 on Ubuntu 19.10 with Linux Kernel 5.0.0.13-generic, X86_64 operating system. The simulation results show that the proposed work significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art related approaches in terms of robustness of the WSN along with the increase in network lifetime. Also, it produces characteristic at tailed distribution with maximum SNs having fewer degree count.