Ant Algorithm for Optimal Sensor Deployment

Telecommunications is a general term for a vast array of technologies that send information over distances. Mobile phones, land lines, satellite phones and voice over Internet protocol are all telephony technologies - just one field of telecommunications. Radio, television and networks are a few more examples of telecommunication. Nowadays, the trend in telecommunication networks is having highly decentralized, multi-node networks. From small, geographically close, size-limited local area networks the evolution has led to the huge worldwide Internet. In this context Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have recently become a hot topic in research. When deploying a WSN, the positioning of the sensor nodes becomes one of the major concerns. One of the objectives is to achieve full coverage of the terrain (sensor field). Another objectives are also to use a minimum number of sensor nodes and to keep the connectivity of the network. In this paper we address a WSN deployment problem in which full coverage and connectivity are treated as constraints, while objective function is the number of the sensors. To solve it we propose Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm.