Technical Correspondence

Wireless-sensor networks (WSNs) are networks of autonomous nodes used for monitoring an environment. Developers of WSNs face challenges that arise from communication link failures, memory and computational constraints, and limited energy. Many issues in WSNs are formulated as multidimensional optimization problems, and approached through bioinspired techniques. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a simple, effective, and computationally efficient optimization algorithm. It has been applied to address WSN issues such as optimal deployment, node localization, clustering, and data aggregation. This paper outlines issues in WSNs, introduces PSO, and discusses its suitability for WSN applications. It also presents a brief survey of how PSO is tailored to address these issues.