A physarum-inspired algorithm for minimal exposure problem in wireless sensor networks

Exposure problem, which corresponds to the quality of coverage, is a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we exploit a cellular computing model in the physarum for solving the minimal exposure problem. We first use the road-network among all points of interesting (PoIs) in the monitoring filed to formulate the minimal exposure problem, and then convert it into the Steiner tree problem by discretizing the monitoring field to a large-scale weighted grid. Inspired by the path-finding capability of physarum, we develop a new heuristic algorithm, named as the physarum optimization, to solve the Steiner tree problem with low complexity and high parallelism. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed models and algorithm are effective for finding the road-network with minimal exposure.