Solving Target Coverage Problem in Wireless Sensor Network Using Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

The past few years have seen tremendous increase of interest in the field of wireless sensor network. These wireless sensor network comprise numerous small sensor nodes distributed in an area and collect specific data from that area. The nodes comprising a network are mostly battery driven and hence have a limited amount of energy. The target coverage deals with the surveillance of the area under consideration taking into account the energy constraint associated with nodes. In nutshell, the lifetime of the network is to be maximized while ensuring that all the targets are monitored. The approach of segregating the nodes into various covers is used such that each cover can monitor all the targets while other nodes in remaining covers are in sleep state. The covers are scheduled to operate in turn thereby ensuring that the targets are monitored all the time and the lifetime of the network is also maximized. The segregation method is based on Maximum Set Cover (MSC) problem which is transformed into Maximum Disjoint Set Cover problem (MDSC). This problem of finding Maximum Disjoint Set Cover falls under the category of NP-Complete problem. Hence, two heuristics based approach are discussed in this work; first Greedy Heuristic is implemented to be used as baseline. Then a Genetic Algorithm based approach is proposed that can solve this problem by evolutionary global search technique. The existing and proposed algorithms are coded and functionality verified using MATLAB R2010b and performance evaluation and comparisons are made in terms of number of sensors and sensing range.