Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have attracted significant interests of many researchers because they have their wide range of applications, such as natural environmental monitoring in forest regions and environmental control in office buildings. In wireless sensor networks, hundreds or thousands of micro-sensor nodes with such resource limitation as battery capacity and memory are deployed in a region and used to obtain information of environments remotely. Therefore, energy-efficient data gathering measures and/or schemes are needed to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. In this study, so as to realize the long-term employment of wireless sensor networks, several relay-dedicated nodes to relay sensor information intensively are effectively placed. This paper proposes a new method based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for locating relay-dedicated nodes, named the PSO for Plural Decent Solutions (PSO-PDS). By using the PSO-PDS, which searches for plural decent solutions not one best solution, plural location candidates of relay-dedicated nodes can be obtained. We evaluate the PSO-PDS using computer simulations and discuss its development potential. In simulation experiment, the PSO-PDS is compared with conventional PSO to verify its effectiveness.
