Optimized Minimum Spanning Tree for border nodes selection in wireless sensor networks

Group-based topologies offer good performance in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) by avoiding the bottleneck issues, reducing points of failure and simplifying the management. Border nodes collaboration is an important issue as those nodes play a critical role in the inter-group routing. An efficient scheme between those nodes is then required. In this paper, the overall problem is formulated as an optimization problem. The search process is based on two evolutionary algorithms combined separately with the Minimum Spanning tree (MST) algorithm. It iteratively evolve a population until finding the best solutions. The aim is to minimize the number of links and the communication cost. Simulations confirm the potential of those mechanisms to find an efficient optimized tree which relates all border nodes, in particular, the logic-gate-based algorithm presents an original and a competent procedure to solve the considered problem to the Differential Evolution algorithm.