Deployment of spare nodes in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a new trend of the future technology. Noble features of WSNs make them applicable to a variety of applications such as real time tracking of objects, monitoring of environmental conditions, monitoring of health structures, and preparing a ubiquitous computing environment. In this paper, we propose to deploy some redundant nodes altogether with main nodes of the network before the network startup phase. These randomly deployed nodes can be used for two purposes. They can either act as helpers to highly loaded nodes for relaying the traffic or replace the dead nodes for sensing and relaying purposes. This scheme allows the network to make use of the additional nodes according to the requirements of the network. The main strategy is to use spare nodes whenever needed. The main advantage of our method is in reducing the time of deploying additional nodes and also the time of utilizing them. This time reduction improves the efficiency of energy consumption.