Particle Swarm Optimization for Disconnected Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which are formed by sensor nodes are used widely for sensing the environment and observing useful information from the data gathered. Due to harsh environmental conditions, the network can be disconnected. Restoring the network's lost connectivity is crucial for future functioning of the network and is done by placing relay nodes, which are small devices used for transmission of sensed data. This problem of reconnecting the network in an optimal manner is shown to be NP-hard; therefore, we practice meta-heuristics to this problem. In this paper, we propose Federating Network using Particle Swarm Optimization (FN-JPSO), which can be applied efficiently for restoring the lost connectivity. Our proposed approach first finds the representative node for each disconnected segment and then creates Steiner points for reconnection. These Steiner points are further used to create random spanning trees, which are used as particles in FN-JPSO to provide an optimal interconnected network.