A Hybrid Algorithm for Optimal Wireless Sensor Network Deployment with the Minimum Number of Sensor Nodes

Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications are rapidly growing and are widely used in various disciplines. Deployment is one of the key issues to be solved in WSNs, since the sensor nodes’ positioning affects highly the system performance. An optimal WSN deployment should maximize the collection of the desired interest phenomena, guarantee the required coverage and connectivity, extend the network lifetime, and minimize the network cost in terms of energy consumption. Most of the research effort in this area aims to solve the deployment issue, without minimizing the network cost by reducing unnecessary working nodes in the network. In this paper, we propose a deployment approach based on the gradient method and the Simulated Annealing algorithm to solve the sensor deployment problem with the minimum number of sensor nodes. The proposed algorithm is able to heuristically optimize the number of sensors and their positions in order to achieve the desired application requirements.