A Novel Approach for Optimal Wireless Sensor Network Deployment

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) limited resources in terms of processing capability and power supply raise a variety of challenges which make them a fertile ground to numerous investigation efforts. Increasing the sensing range, maintaining and improving the connectivity, or extending the lifetime represent the main objectives of WSN researches. In this paper we propose an approach for the deployment of WSN based on the use of simulated annealing to obtain close to optimal solutions for the placement of sensors in terms of minimizing the number of hops between all the nodes of the target region and the sink node while covering as much of the interest area as possible. By reducing the number of hops, the energy saving is also improved. Finally, this paper shows the flexibility of this technique for studying the influence of different parameters of interest at a design stage of the network, prior to the real deployment of WSN nodes.