An Energy-Efficient Sensor Deployment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Sensor deployment is one of the most important issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), because an efficient deployment scheme can reduce the cost and enhance the detection capability of the WSNs. Due to packet forwarding, sensors closer to the sink consume more energy than those farther away. In this paper, we propose a sensor deployment scheme, which can achieve full coverage of the monitoring area and prolong network lifetime. We consider a real world situation where the initial energy of the sensors is different from each other. First, to achieve full coverage using as few sensors as possible, we compute the average angle between the sensor nodes. Then, we provide two methods to achieve energy balance. In the first method, we propose a sweep-based scheme to move the sensors as requested. In the second method, we transform the deployment problem into the multiple knapsack problem and based on ant colony optimization algorithm, we propose a deployment strategy to improve the network lifetime.