Highly Improved Artificial Bee Colony Scheme to Enhance Coverage and Fault Tolerance in Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of low-powered, low-cost and small sensors, which are communicating wirelessly with each other. Their target is to collect, process and communicate information about their surrounding environments. Due to the widespread of WSNs, fault tolerance is an important design issue to be considered. Fault tolerance refers to the ability of the system to continue operating in case of the failure of one or more nodes. There are many reasons for a node to fail in WSNs such as the failure in modules, the node out of the communication range, and due to battery depletion. Another critical design issue that needs to be considered in WSNs is the deployment issue. Nodes deployment determines the position of each node in the network. Many researchers have studied the dynamic deployment of the network in order to improve the coverage of the network using many techniques such as Artificial Ant Colony, Virtual Force (VF) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). This work considers both the dynamic deployment and fault tolerance issues at the same time. The goal of this work is to design an effective dynamic node deployment mechanism that recognizes the possibility of nodes failure in the future. Therefore, this paper's goal is not just to maximize the coverage area at the deployment time, but to maximize it in case of node failure as well. The proposed mechanisms will utilize Artificial Bee Colony in order to obtain an efficient solution. In this work, two schemes are proposed: the Improved Artificial Bee Colony (IABC) and the Highly Improved Artificial Bee Colony HIABC. Simulation results show that HIABC outperforms both IABC and ABC, while IABC outperforms ABC algorithm.