Improved bees algorithm for the deployment of homogeneous and heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Nowadays, countless applications benefit from the services provided by wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in remote surveillance and data gathering. Coverage is considered an important quality of service (QoS) criterion for many of these applications. To ensure that the required QoS is achieved, the sensors must be placed in locations that optimise the area coverage and eliminate the coverage holes, especially when deploying sensors with heterogeneous sensing ranges. In this paper, a novel sensor deployment scheme based on the improved bees algorithm (IBA) for optimising the area coverage in both homogeneous and heterogeneous WSNs is proposed. The IBA includes a neighbourhood shrinking procedure that aims to improve the local search efficiency and a site abandonment procedure for preventing the algorithm from the entrapment in a local optimum. Experiments show that the IBA delivers high-quality solutions and optimises the area coverage effectively compared with four state-of-the-art methods in homogeneous and heterogeneous WSNs.