An enhanced obstacle-aware deployment scheme with an opposition-based competitive swarm optimizer for mobile WSNs

Abstract The network coverage problem for an area with a randomly deployed wireless sensor network (WSN) in the presence of obstacles can be alleviated through mobile sensor nodes. However, the requirement for the dissipated energy in mobility and sensing has increased. Therefore, energy efficient coverage is a significant issue and has been near-optimally solved by heuristic techniques. Focusing on this issue, this paper introduces an improved competitive swarm optimizer to maximize the coverage area and minimize the network energy simultaneously. The proposed method incorporates the virtual force algorithm (VFA) and the Voronoi diagram (VD) to improve the network performance during the optimization process. The VFA is combined with a boundary mechanism to control the locations of sensors, while the VD is utilized to extract the network information for the decoding process. The superior performance of the model is verified by intensive evaluations against state-of-the-art techniques in terms of the coverage ratio and network energy consumption.