Faten Hajjej, Ridha Ejbali and Mourad Zaied, Research Group on Intelligent Machines (REGIM-Lab) Sfax, Tunisia

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are experiencing a revival of interest and a continuous advancement in various scientific and industrial fields. WSNs offer favorable low cost and readily deployable solutions to perform the monitoring, target tracking, and recognition of physical events. The foremost step required for these types of ad-hoc networks is to deploy all the sensor nodes in their positions carefully to form an efficient network. Such network should satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements in order to achieve high performance levels. In this paper we address the coverage requirement and its relation with WSN nodes placement problems. In fact, we present a new optimization approach based on the Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) to find the best placement topologies in terms of coverage maximization. We have compared the performance of the resulting algorithm, called FPACO, with the original practical swarm optimization (PSO) and the genetic algorithm (GA). In all the test instances, FPACO performs better than all other algorithms.

WSN, Sensors Deployment problem, Coverage, FPA.