A circulatory system approach for wireless sensor networks

One of the challenges in a military wireless sensor network is the determination of an information collection infrastructure which minimizes battery power consumption. The problem of determining the right information collection infrastructure can be viewed as a variation of the network design problem, with the additional constraints related to battery power minimization and redundancy. The problem in its generality is NP-hard and various heuristics have been developed over time to address various issues associated with it. In this paper, we propose a heuristic based on the mammalian circulatory system, which results in a better solution to the design problem than the state of the art alternatives. © 2008 Elsevier B.V.