Maximizing the Coverage of Sensor Deployments Using a Memetic Algorithm and Fast Coverage Estimation

We derive the upper and lower bounds on the coverage of a 2-D deployment of static sensors. We use these bounds in constructing a method of estimating the coverage of deployment by assuming that there are only pairwise intersections between the disks representing the range of each sensor. The speed of this approximation allows it to be built into a local search technique, as part of a memetic algorithm (MA) that tries to deploy a given set of sensors with maximum coverage. We show that this MA outperforms the previous techniques in terms of both speed and coverage achieved.