A metaheuristic algorithm for wireless sensor network design in railway structures

In this paper we study the resource constrained store-carry-forward wireless sensor networks to be utilized for the maintenance of railway structures, and propose a method for designing these networks based on a metaheuristic algorithm. At first, we point out that we need to solve the two problems, namely the one to decide places for deploying gateways equipped with storage and the other to decide the transmitting paths for sending each sensor data to one of the gateways, in order to design the resource constrained store-carry-forward wireless sensor networks. After we integrate these two problems into one problem and formulate this integrated problem as a mathematical problem, we propose a method to generate a near optimal solution for this problem based on a metaheuristic algorithm. Finally we verify the effectiveness of our method through the computational experiments with application of the data of real railway tunnel.