Multi-objective mobile agent-based Sensor Network Routing using MOEA/D

Mobile agents are often used in wireless sensor networks for distributed target detection with the goal of minimizing the transmission of non-critical data that negatively affects the performance of the network. A challenge is to find optimal mobile agent routes for minimizing the data path loss and the sensors energy consumption as well as maximizing the data accuracy. Existing approaches deal with the objectives individually, or by optimizing one and constraining the others or by combining them into a single objective. This often results in missing “good” tradeoff solutions. Only few approaches have tackled the Mobile Agent-based Distributed Sensor Network Routing problem as a Multiobjective Optimization Problem (MOP) using conventional Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs). It is well known that the incorporation of problem specific knowledge in MOEAs is a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a problem-specific MOEA based on Decomposition (MOEA/D) for optimizing the three objectives. Experimental studies have shown that the proposed problem-specific approach performs better than two conventional MOEAs in several WSN test instances.