Lagrangian heuristic method for the wireless sensor network design problem in railway structural health monitoring

In this paper, we study a design method for minimizing the total cost of a wireless sensor network (WSN) used for health monitoring of railway structures. First, we present the problem, that is to simultaneously determine the number of relays and their deployment locations, the transmission power level for each sensor and relay, and the routes for transferring sensor data to a gateway using multi-hop wireless communication. Second, we formulate this task as a mathematical programming problem, and to solve this problem, we propose a near optimal algorithm based on the Lagrangian heuristic method. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of our algorithm through computational experiments carried out using data acquired from a real WSN used for railway structural health monitoring. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.