A Tabu search WSN deployment method for monitoring geographically irregular distributed events

Abstract

In this paper, we address the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployment issue. We assume that the observed area is characterized by the geographical irregularity of the sensed events. Formally, we consider that each point in the deployment area is associated a differentiated detection probability threshold, which must be satisfied by our deployment method. Our resulting WSN deployment problem is formulated as a Multi-Objectives Optimization problem, which seeks to reduce the gap between the generated events detection probabilities and the required thresholds while minimizing the number of deployed sensors. To overcome the computational complexity of an exact resolution, we propose an original pseudo-random approach based on the Tabu Search heuristic. Simulations show that our proposal achieves better performances than several other approaches proposed in the literature. In the last part of this paper, we generalize the deployment problem by including the wireless communication network connectivity constraint. Thus, we extend our proposal to ensure that the resulting WSN topology is connected even if a sensor communication range takes small values. © 2008 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland.