Meta-heuristic based optimization of WSNs energy and lifetime-A Survey

Wireless sensor networks unusual capability of sensing, processing and communicating, is making WSN more promising field in number of applications like health care, military, and agriculture. Sensor nodes play a vital role in the effective functioning of WSN. Sensor nodes basically gather data from different sources, called data aggregation, then processes this data to make critical decisions, further communicates this data to different devices for their decision making processes. So, effective utilization of resources is very important here, resources like battery, memory usage, power management are very important to improve the lifetime of the WSN. This will also help in increasing the productivity of the network. Increasing the lifetime of the sensor nodes is one of the biggest challenges in this field. The lifetime of sensor nodes can be increased by decreasing the energy consumption and in the past decade, number of techniques had been proposed to do so. Different meta-heuristic techniques had been proposed for the same as ICA, Ant colony optimization, cuckoo search etc. This paper focuses on a survey on the techniques and methods proposed on improving the lifetime and reducing the energy consumption of the network using meta-heuristics.