Investigating Coverage and Connectivity Trade-offs in Wireless Sensor Networks: The Benefits of MOEAs

How many wireless sensor nodes should be used and where should they be placed in order to form an optimal wireless sensor network (WSN) deployment? This is a difficult question to answer for a decision maker due to the conflicting objectives of deployment costs and wireless transmission reliability. Here, we address this problem using a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) which allows to identify the trade-offs between low-cost and highly reliable deployments—providing the decision maker with a set of good solutions to choose from. For the MOEA, we use an off-the-shelf selector and propose a problem-specific representation, an initialization scheme, and variation operators. The resulting algorithm is applied to a test deployment scenario to show the usefulness of the approach in terms of decision making.