An Efficient Ant Colony Algorithm for Node Deployment in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), node deployment is one of the most crucial issues as it impacts the cost of network deploy ment, capability of the network to achieve coverage objectives as well as the life time of WSN. In this thesis, problem of minimum cost and connectivity guaranteed grid coverage (MCGC) is consid ered for WSN deployment. Ant colony optimization is an applica bleapproachforthecombinatorialoptimizationproblemofMCGC. A novel ACO based algorithm, ACO-Discreet is proposed in this thesis to obtain solutions for the problem of MCGC. ACO-Discreet works in two phases. In Phase-I, solution building process is car ried out like ordinary ACO-based algorithms. Phase-II effectively removes the redundant sensors that are present in the solution ob tained from Phase-I and hence considerably reduces the coverage cost. Simulation results have been presented to show the effective ness of the proposed algorithm.