Maximizing lifetime in wireless sensor networks with multiple sensor families

Wireless sensor networks are generally composed of a large number of hardware devices of the same type, deployed over a region of interest in order to perform a monitoring activity on a set of target points. Nowadays, several different types of sensor devices exist, which are able to monitor different aspects of the region of interest (including sound, vibrations, proximity, chemical contaminants, among others) and may be deployed together in a heterogeneous network. In this work, we face the problem of maximizing the amount of time during which such a network can remain operational, while maintaining at all times a minimum coverage guarantee for all the different sensor types. Some global regularity conditions in order to guarantee a fair level of coverage for each sensor type to each target are also taken into account in a second variant of the proposed problem. For both problem variants we developed an exact approach, which is based on a column generation algorithm whose subproblem is either solved heuristically by means of a genetic algorithm or optimally by an appropriate ILP formulation. In our computational tests the proposed genetic algorithm is shown to be able to dramatically speed up the procedure, enabling the resolution of large-scale instances within reasonable computational times.