A sensor deployment approach for target coverage problem in wireless sensor networks

Sensor deployment is a fundamental issue in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Studies on the coverage problem are concentrated on deploying sensors to cover determined areas or a set of determined points (targets). On the other hand, the sensor network should have a lifetime long enough to fulfill the application requirements. Therefore, prolonging the network lifetime must be taken into account in designing a solution for a WSN that covers determined points. The problem of determining the location of sensor nodes such that the targets are covered and the network lifetime is maximized is called the sensor deployment problem. So far, various approaches, such as heuristics and approximation algorithms, have been used to solve the sensor deployment problem in WSNs. In this paper, we use two improved versions of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the sensor deployment problem. The first one is cooperative PSO and the second one is improved cooperative PSO using fuzzy logic. The simulation results show that the algorithms proposed in this paper solve the target coverage problem with a longer network lifetime compared to the other similar algorithms.