Abstract
Lifetime is a key issue in wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. An effective way to extend WSN lifetime is to partition the set of sensors into several covers and activate them alternately. More covers then lead to longer lifetime. Finding the maximum number of covers under full coverage constraint has been formulated as an NP-complete problem - the SET KCOVER problem. This study proposes the tabu search with random walk to deal with this problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing heuristic algorithms and genetic algorithm in number of covers obtained. Moreover, it achieves comparable solution quality with much less running time than the exhaustive search method does. The simulation results further validate the advantage of random walk in improving the performance of tabu search. These preferable results demonstrate the high capability of the proposed algorithm to extend WSN lifetime. © 2012 IEEE.