Coverage optimization in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely studied and usefully employed in many applications such as monitoring environment, embedded system and so on. Coverage preservation, unique ID assignment and extension of network lifetime are important features for wireless sensor networks. Grouping sensor nodes into clusters is an effective way to improve the network performance. The ratio of covered area to interested area and the lifetime of the network are two of the most challenging issues in WSNs. This is referred to coverage ratio problem. In this paper we consider a more realistic network scenario of WSNs with fixed and heterogeneous sensors. The sensors are distributed randomly and their sensing radius can be controlled in an interval. The goal function and a simple pruning algorithm are presented. The good performance of the evolutionary strategy-up to 99%- shows that it can be utilized in this nonlinear optimization problem.