A novel knowledge-guided evolutionary scheduling strategy for energy-efficient connected coverage optimization in WSNs

One of the most important challenges in designing wireless sensor network is how to construct full-connected network containing least active sensor nodes with satisfied quality of services, such as the coverage rate and energy consumption. This energy-efficiency full-connected coverage optimization problem is modeled as a single-objective optimization problem with constraint. To solve this problem, a knowledge-guided evolutionary scheduling strategy is proposed. Three highlights of this strategy are: (1) Knowledge is defined as the importance of sensor node, which depends on the distance between sensor node and sink node. (2) The genes of an individual correspond to senor nodes in descending order of their importance. (3) Considering sensor nodes’ importance and redundancy rate, knowledge-guided mutation operator and repair strategy are present. Simulation results show that the proposed method can find the optimal full-connected wireless sensor network containing least sensor nodes and consuming less energy for communication by less computation time. Though the coverage rate of the optimum is larger, it still satisfies the coverage constraint. Moreover, this strategy fits for the problems that the communication radius of sensor node is less than two times of its sensing radius.