ECAH: A New Energy-Aware Coverage Method for Wireless Sensor Networks using Artificial Bee Colony and Harmony Search

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) offer diverse applications in the research and commercial fields, such as military applications, medical science, waste management, home automation, habitat monitoring, and environmental observation. WSNs are generally composed of a large number of low-cost, low-power, and multifunctional sensor nodes that sense, process, and communicate data. These nodes are connected by a wireless medium, allowing them to collect and share data with each other. To achieve network coverage in a WSN, a few to thousands of tiny and low-power sensor nodes should be placed in an interconnected manner. Over the last decade, deploying sensor nodes in a WSN to cover a large area has received much attention. Coverage, regarded as an NP-hard problem, is an essential parameter for WSNs that determines how the deployed sensor nodes handle each point of interest. Various algorithms have been proposed to tackle this problem. However, they often come with a trade-off between energy efficiency and coverage rate. Moreover, the scalability of the algorithms needs to be considered for large-scale networks. This paper proposes a novel energy-aware method combining Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) and Harmony Search (HS) algorithms to address the coverage problem in WSN, called ECAH. The proposed ECAH algorithm has been tested with various network scenarios and compared with other existing algorithms. The results show that ECAH outperforms the existing methods in terms of network lifetime, coverage rate, and energy consumption. Additionally, the proposed algorithm is also more robust and efficient as it can adjust to dynamic network environment changes, making it suitable for various network scenarios.