Maximizing Energy Efficiency by Optimizing Relay Deployment in EH-WSNs for Smart Grid

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often applied in smart grid to monitor the electrical faults, and the sensor nodes harvest electromagnetic energy continuously from surrounding equipment to power themselves. For some sensor nodes far from the power devices, their consumed energy is more than the collected one, which makes them not work well. To enhance network performance and improve the energy efficency for energy harvesting wireless sensor networks (EH-WSNs), this letter proposes a novel energy efficiency model and designs a relay deployment scheme. Deploying the fewest relays for the maximum energy efficiency is formulated as minimum relay maximum energy efficiency (MRMEE) problem, which is NP-hard, and a particle swarm optimization-genetic algorithm (PSO-GA) is developed to obtain the appropriate solution. Simulation results show that the proposal can improve the energy efficiency and prolong the network lifetime compared with other approaches.