A Real-Coded Optimal Sensor Deployment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Based on the Social Spider Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) involves a set of wireless sensor nodes located within a region of interest (ROI) to acquire and/or transmit specific information from their surroundings. A common problem in the operation of WSNs is sensor coverage, which is related to the distribution of sensor nodes within their ROI. Several approaches have been proposed to solve this problem; however, most of these methods consider a simplified arrangement scheme based on sensor placement over a set of fixed discrete locations defined by a grid. This fact severally limits the ability of these methods to find potentially better solutions as they are conditioned to select a limited number of candidate solutions. In this paper, a real-coded sensor deployment approach based on the Social Spider Optimization (SSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of optimal sensor deployment (OSD) in WSNs. The performance of our proposed approach (referred in this paper as real-coded SSO [R-SSO]) was also compared against other metaheuristics-based methods used in the literature. Experimental results demonstrate its ability to solve the problem of OSD in terms of accuracy and robustness.