Sensor deployment in irregular terrain using Artificial Bee Colony algorithm

The main objective of sensor deployment problem in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is to use minimum number of sensor nodes with given sensing range that can cover any target in the coverage area to monitor the environment. The optimal sensor deployment enables accurate sensing information on target behavior with minimum sensing range and number of sensor nodes. The target coverage terrain in a locality need not be a smooth rectangle which makes the deployment problem more complex. The optimal sensor deployment is a problem of maximizing coverage and minimizing number of sensor nodes which has been proved to be NP-hard. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, inspired by the food foraging behavior of honey bees is recently being used for different optimization problems and found to be efficient for a wide range of applications including data clustering. In this paper, the sensor deployment problem is modeled as a data clustering problem and optimal solution to the deployment problem is obtained using ABC algorithm. The results show that ABC algorithm gives robust and good quality of solution.