Barrier coverage of WSNs with the imperialist competitive algorithm

Barrier coverage in wireless sensor networks has been used in many applications such as intrusion detection and border surveillance. Barrier coverage is used to monitor the network borders to prevent intruders from penetrating the network. In these applications, it is critical to find optimal number of sensor nodes to prolong the network lifetime. Also, increasing the network lifetime is one of the important challenges in these networks. Various algorithms have been proposed to extend the network lifetime while guaranteeing barrier coverage requirements. In this paper, we use the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) for selecting sensor nodes to do barrier coverage monitoring operations called ICABC. The main objective of this work is to improve the network lifetime in a deployed network. To investigate the performance of ICABC, several simulations were conducted and the results of the experiments show that the ICABC significantly improves the performance than other state-of-art methods.