A Tabu Search Heuristic for Point Coverage, Sink Location, and Data Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

The point coverage, sink location, and data routing problems are considered in an integrated way and two new mixed-integer programming formulations are proposed. As these models are difficult to solve, a nested solution procedure is proposed. The best sensor locations are sought by tabu search in the upper level. For the fixed sensor locations, the remaining problem of determining sink locations and data routes are solved efficiently in the lower level. According to the experimental results performed on a number of test instances, the performance of the nested solution approach is quite satisfactory, and the proposed heuristic method brings considerable improvements over a two-stage solution approach.