EasiDesign: An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for Sensor Deployment in Real Sensor Network System

In this paper, we formulate coverage requirements of the sensor network as a minimum-cost connectivity guaranteed point k-coverage problem. An improved ant colony algorithm (EasiDesign) is proposed to achieve the approximate solution to this optimization problem. We made modifications in the convergence strategy and the ant state transition rule of the general ant colony optimization. Considering the practicability issues, we design the obstacle avoidance and the routing cost tradeoff strategies to ensure that EasiDesign can work efficiently. The simulation results show that EasiDesign uses less sensor nodes than the existing works in the same scenario. The performance is also demonstrated through a real sensor network system for the environment monitoring in the Forbidden City.