An effective genetic algorithm for improving wireless sensor network lifetime

An important scheme for extending sensor network lifetime is to divide sensor nodes into disjoint groups such that each group covers all targets and works alternatively. This scheme can be transformated to the Disjoint Set Covers (DSC) problem, which is proved to be NP-complete. Existing heuristic algorithms either get barely satisfactory solutions or take exponential time complexity. In this paper, we present a genetic algorithm to solve the DSC problem. Simulation results show that the proposed genetic algorithm can improve the most constrained-minimum constraining heuristic algorithm (MCMCC) in solution quality by $99\%$ with only polynomial computation time complexity.