A genetic algorithm for selecting cooperative or direct communications between nodes in wireless sensor networks

摘要

Abstract An effective technique to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to make use of cooperative communications between nodes. In this technique, all nodes contribute to the transmission of data as senders and may transmit their data through relay nodes instead of sending directly to the receivers. This paper has the goal of reducing energy consumption. In this way, two wasted energies are considered, including the consumption for data transfer between any given pair of nodes and the same for end-to-end data transfer. In practice, the problem can be modeled as an optimization problem. However, finding the solution for this problem needs large resources such as memory and processing units. We propose a multi-objective genetic algorithm to solve this problem. The proposed algorithm balances the per-hop energy consumption with the end-to-end ones using the Pareto analysis. The simulations show that the proposed method offers acceptable results in comparison with the optimization model. However, the proposed algorithm can be solved in a shorter time.