steepest descent algorithm

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a set of spatially distributed sensors with the pre-determined or randomly structure. Coverage, as an important performance indicator of WSNs, is subdivided into three classes of target coverage, area coverage and barrier coverage. This paper investigates problems of target and area coverage for a randomly distributed WSN. To this end, the analytical algorithm of steepest descent (SD) with Armijo and Wolf rules is suggested as a new solution for target coverage, and the SD algorithm along with evolutionary Genetic and Shuffled Frog Leaping algorithms (GA and SFLA) are utilized for the maximization of area coverage. According to the results of performance evaluation over different scenarios, it is confirmed that utilizing SD algorithm for the target coverage could increase the coverage accuracy and reduce the computational complexity compared with the evolutionary method the GA. Moreover, the SD algorithm can manage sensors movement towards targets. Furthermore, in the case of area coverage, the results reveal that SFLA provides more coverage accuracy in comparison with the GA although this improvement leads to more complexity of the SFLA.