Anomaly resilient node placement approach for pipelines monitoring

Wireless sensor network has proven to be a good candidate for many monitoring applications such as habitat monitoring, structural health monitoring, pipeline monitoring, etc. Pipeline monitoring is a challenging application where the sensors are placed in a linear topology. This linear topology requires careful attention in placing sensors to ensure robustness against anomaly, minimize the energy consumption and maximize the network lifetime. This paper investigates this problem by improving and evaluating the performance of two greedy node placement approaches. In contrast to existing work, we have validated experimentally the 31 power levels of CC2420 TelosB chipon and their corresponding transmission ranges. Having more power-level resolution yields less energy consumption and longer lifetime compared to traditional 8 power levels. Extensive simulation and real experiments have been conducted. The results demonstrate 23% extension in the lifetime when all power levels are adopted.