Evolutionary Based Set Covers Algorithm with Local Refinement for Power Aware Wireless Sensor Networks Design

Abstract

Establishing coverage of the target sensing field and extending the network’s lifetime, together known as Coverage-lifetime is the key issue in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Recent studies realize the important role of nature-inspired algorithms in handling coverage-lifetime problem with different optimization aspects. One of the main formulations is to define coverage-lifetime problem as a disjoint set covers problem. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm for solving coverage-lifetime problem as a disjoint set covers function. The main interest in this paper is to reflect both models of sensing: Boolean and probabilistic. Moreover, a heuristic operator is proposed as a local refinement operator to improve the quality of the solutions provided by the evolutionary algorithm. Simulation results show the necessity to inject a heuristic operator within the mechanism of evolutionary algorithm to improve its performance. Additionally, the results show performance difference while adopting the two types of sensing models.