Optimal placement of relay nodes in wireless sensor network using artificial bee colony algorithm

• A novel energy efficient optimal deployment strategy is proposed in this work.
• The algorithm uses Artificial Bee Colony to optimize the network parameters.
• Lifetime enhancement is assured while cost and connectivity constraints are satisfied.
• The proposed strategy is benchmarked with an existing solution called the SP3D.
• Numerical results show the efficacy of the proposed deployment strategy.

Deploying sensor nodes randomly most of the time generates initial communication hole even in highly dense networks. These communication holes cannot be totally eliminated even when the deployment is done in a structured manner. In either case, the resulting inter-node distances may degrade the performance of the network. This paper proposes an enhanced deployment algorithm based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC). The ABC-based deployment is guaranteed to extend the lifetime by optimizing the network parameters and constraining the total number of deployed relays. Simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy under different cases of problem complexity. Results show that the proposed approach improves the network lifetime considerably when compared to solutions reported in the literature such as Shortest Path 3-D grid Deployment (SP3D) algorithm.