Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are a type of wireless networks with a large number of nodes. They are characterized by a very dense and large-scale node deployment, that are often limited in terms of resources. These nodes, deployed around or in an area to be monitored, are used for data acquisition and transmission to a processing station commonly known as a \”Base Station\”. The most important characteristics of these nodes are their ability to self-organize, cooperation, quickly deployment, be error-tolerant and be low-cost. However, sensor networks are tightly constrained in terms of energy, memory, processing capacity and throughput. They are also constrained by low bandwidth and high latency due to the nature of the shared radio channel. The sensors can be mobile. This requires algorithms that are adaptive to changing network topology. Nevertheless, the real critical challenge in this type of network is energy, as sensors are often equipped with non-rechargeable batteries. Thus, the main challenge in these networks is to minimize energy consumption while ensuring that the network performs its main task, namely monitoring an area of interest.

Therefore, the designing of a WSN deployment strategy generally aims to achieve many objectives simultaneously, for example, maximizing total covered area and minimizing the network energy consumption . We often encounter contradictory objectives.Thus, using the several optimization approaches for deployment issues could find the best compromise between conflicting objectives. This chapter describes some general information on wireless sensor networks. Next, we will present an overview of the deployment methodologies. Finally, we will detail the different work dealing with optimized deployment in wireless sensor