[IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications, November 2009, pp. 5564-5574 ]

An Algorithm for Wireless Relay Placement

Jillian Cannons, Laurence Milstein, and Kenneth Zeger

Abstract

An algorithm is given for placing relays at spatial positions to improve the reliability of communicated data in a sensor network. The network consists of many power-limited sensors, a small set of relays, and a receiver. The receiver receives a signal directly from each sensor and also indirectly from one relay per sensor. The relays rebroadcast the transmissions in order to achieve diversity at the receiver. Both amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relay networks are considered. Channels are modeled with Rayleigh fading, path loss, and additive white Gaussian noise. Performance analysis and numerical results are given.