Efficient Node Deployment of Large-Scale Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) became essential in developing many applications, including smart cities and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. WSN has been used in many critical applications such as healthcare, military, and transportation. Such applications depend mainly on the performance of the deployed sensor nodes. Therefore, the deployment process has to be perfectly arranged. However, the deployment process for a WSN is challenging due to many of the constraints to be taken into consideration. For instance, mobile nodes are already utilized in many applications, and their localization needs to be considered during the deployment process. Besides, heterogeneous nodes are employed in many recent applications due to their efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Moreover, the development areas might have different properties due to their importance. Those parameters increase the deployment complexity and make it hard to reach the best deployment scheme. This work, therefore, seeks to discover the best deployment plan for a WSN, considering these limitations throughout the deployment process. First, the deployment problem is defined as an optimization problem and mathematically formulated using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to understand the problem better. The main objective function is to maximize the coverage of a given field with a network lifetime constraint. Nodes’ mobility and heterogeneity are added to the deployment constraints. The importance of the monitored field subareas is also introduced in this paper, where some subareas could have more importance than others. The paper utilizes Swarm Intelligence as a heuristic algorithm for the large-scale deployment problem. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm produces efficient deployment schemes with a high coverage rate and minimum energy consumption compared to some recent algorithms. The proposed algorithm shows more than a 30% improvement in coverage and network lifetime.