Finding Base-Station Locations in Two-Tiered Wireless Sensor Networks by Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks, minimizing power consumption to prolong network lifetime is very crucial. In the past, Pan et al. proposed two algorithms to find the optimal locations of base stations in two-tiered wireless sensor networks. Their approaches assumed the initial energy and the energy-consumption parameters were the same for all application nodes. If any of the above parameters were not the same, their approaches could not work. Recently, the PSO technique has been widely used in finding nearly optimal solutions for optimization problems. In this paper, an algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is thus proposed for general power-consumption constraints. The proposed approach can search for nearly optimal BS locations in heterogeneous sensor networks, where application nodes may own different data transmission rates, initial energies and parameter values. Experimental results also show the good performance of the proposed PSO approach and the effects of the parameters on the results. The proposed algorithm can thus help find good BS locations to reduce power consumption and maximize network lifetime in two-tiered wireless sensor networks.