Moth Flame Based Optimized Placement of Relay Nodes for Fault Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to adverse effects of hostile deployment environment(s), sensors nodes (SNs) deployed in the network may drain or get damaged. This attributes for loss of connectivity between the sensors and the sink node. Hence it is necessary to design the wireless sensor network (WSN) in a manner that the network is capable of coping up with the failure of few nodes/links. Using single hop data communication model reduces the lifetime of the network as the SNs are resource constrained (in terms of battery). Relay nodes (RNs) facilitate in improving network lifetime, fault tolerance and/or connectivity. Finding minimum number of relay nodes for a fault tolerant, fully connected network is a NP Hard problem. In this paper, we follow two phase relay node placement procedure to achieve the objective. In the first phase, we cluster the SNs using mean shift algorithm and place RNs as the cluster heads. In the second phase, we use metaheuristic algorithms like Moth Flame Optimization (MFO), Differential Evolution (DE), Bat algorithm (BA) and Biogeography Based Optimization algorithm (BBO) to place the RNs such that the required fault tolerance is achieved along with fully connected network. Extensive simulation results prove that MFO algorithm performs better for fault tolerant relay node placement problem.