A Novel WSN Relay Nodes Placement Strategy in NPP Equipment Monitoring Application

operation state monitoring of equipment is vital to ensure reliable operation in nuclear power plant (NPP). Wireless sensor network can reduce monitoring cost, enlarge monitoring range, and improve monitoring quality, and relay nodes placement is a fundamental way to form efficient and reliable wireless sensor network. Current placement research do not consider NPP special problems, such as obstacles blocking, low network robustness, and constrained placement position. In this paper, we first describe problem of applying WSN into NPP, and then we propose a three-step application oriented solution: constructing redundant edge-connected network, optimization through genetic algorithm, and generating position of relay nodes. Experimental result shows that this solution outperforms artificial placement and random placement with 3-D obstacles avoidance, better network fault tolerance, and optimized placement position. Also our genetic algorithm achieves high performance, with 1.85% run time of enumeration algorithm.