ACO-Discreet: An Efficient Node Deployment Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) rely on effective deployment of sensing nodes. Efficient sensor deployment with ensured connectivity is a major challenge in WSNs. Several deployment approaches have been proposed in literature to address the connectivity and efficiency of sensor networks. However, most of these works either lack in efficiency or ignore the connectivity issues. In this paper, we propose an efficient and connectivity-based algorithm by modifying the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) (Liu and He, J Netw Comput Appl 39:310–318, 2014). Traditional ACO algorithms ensure coverage at a high cost and repetitive sensing, which results in resource wastage. Our proposed algorithm reduces the sensing cost with efficient deployment and enhanced connectivity. Simulation results indicate the ability of proposed framework to significantly reduce the coverage cost as well as achieve longer life time for WSNs.