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.