Towards energy balancing optimization in wireless sensor networks: A novel quantum inspired genetic algorithm based sinks deployment approach

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with multiple sinks alleviates the bottleneck problem of imbalanced energy consumption and leads to improved scalability and convenience in data collection for diverse range of large-scale applications. However, introducing more than one sink also brings a new set of challenges to overcome. To minimize the uneven energy consumption among sensors for longevity of the WSN, it is required to find optimal locations of the sinks that will permit most of the sensors to forward their data using minimum hops and to determine the optimal route for each sink with consistent route length. Routing in large networks is an NP-Hard problem. Previous schemes have solved this problem using multiple sinks deployment either in planned ways or random manner without simultaneously considering the possibilities of network topological changes, edge cases of sensors, and problem of uneven path length. In this context, this paper proposes a quantum inspired genetic algorithm based multiple sinks deployment approach (Q-GEMS) for energy consumption balancing among sensors to extend the network lifetime. Specially, the exiting approaches have focused on either minimizing energy consumption or reducing the path length. In addition to addressing these constraints, the proposed QGEMS is designed to be resilient which adapts to any changes in the planned topologies of deployed sinks in anticipation of sensor failures and external influences. Also to achieve greater energy consumption balance among sensors by equalizing the path length and bring down the cost of WSN by minimizing the number of sinks, novel heuristics have been proposed for positioning the sinks, binding the sensors to sinks, evaluating the quality of solutions and updating the Q-bit population. The experimental results show that the proposed Q-GEMS performs comparatively better than state of the art approaches and achieving network lifetime 5.1%, 21%, and 24% longer than that of EEMS, EESS, and DPSO+PSO respectively.