A Hybrid Firefly with Dynamic Multi-swarm Particle Swarm Optimization for WSN Deployment

Enhancing the coverage area of the sensing range with the limiting resource is a critical problem in the wireless sensor network (WSN). Mobile sensors are patched coverage holes and they also have limited energy to move in large distances. Several recent studies indicated the metaheuristic algorithms can find an acceptable deployed solution in a reasonable time, especially the PSO-based algorithm. However, the speeds of convergence of most PSO-based algorithms are too fast which will lead to the premature problem to degrade the quality of deployed performance in WSN. A hybrid metaheuristic combined with dynamic multi-swarm particle swarm optimization and firefly algorithm will be presented in this paper to find an acceptable deployed solution with the maximum coverage rate and minimum energy consumption via static and mobile sensors. Moreover, a novel switch search mechanism between sub-swarms will also be presented for the proposed algorithm to avoid fall into local optimal in early convergence process. The simulation results show that the proposed method can obtain better solutions than other PSO-based deployment algorithms compared in this paper in terms of coverage rate and energy consumption.