Evolutionary-based Wireless Sensor Deployment for Target Coverage

The sensor deployment problem consists in finding an optimal (or near-optimal) way of placing sensors in a given area in order to cover the whole space. However, sometimes it is not necessary to monitor the complete area; one may want to focus on some points considered as target. This leads to the target coverage problem. This problem includes two main processes: (1) placing sensors around the targets, (2) scheduling the activation time redundant sensors in order to lengthen the network lifetime. This paper proposes a multi-objective approach based on genetic algorithms that aims to simultaneously find good positions of sensor nodes and the maximum number of disjoint cover sets. A new chromosome (solution) encoding in which the genes contain both, the position and the identifier of sensor owning group is introduced. The efficiency of the proposed approach is assessed by a comparison with existing methods.