Abstract
The communication problem is to select a minimal set of placed sensor devices in a service area so that the entire service area is accessible by the minimal set of sensors. Finding the minimal set of sensors is modeled as a vertex-cover problem, where the vertex-cover set facilitates the communications between the sensors in a multi-hop fashion keeping in mind the limited communication range and battery lifespan of all sensors. The vertex-cover is a subset of the coverage set of sensors; therefore, we transform the search space from a continuous domain into a discrete domain. We encoded the vertex-cover problem into the evolutionary domain, where the objective function is to select a minimal set of sensors out of the coverage sensors to act as the vertex-cover set so that its communication range covers all the coverage sensors. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our evolutionary approach in finding minimal vertex cover set, which is less than 37% of total sensors used as communication sensors, in under 14 seconds with 100% coverage of the sensor nodes in wireless sensor network.