Use of Various Optimization Algorithms in the Energy Minimization Problem Domain of WSN: A Survey

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of sensor nodes that are geographically distributed and wirelessly connected. A wireless sensor node is a small device that can sense various physical measurements from its environment and after converting them into electrical signals it can send and receive a limited quantity of data to other nodes or a sink node in the network. The sensed data is used to facilitate the users in different ways. A wireless sensor node typically contains a microcontroller unit (responsible for processing), a transceiver unit (responsible for communication), a data storage unit (responsible for storing information), one or more sensors, and a battery stored power unit (responsible for supplying energy to other units). The power storage capability of the small battery is quite limited. If the use of energy is not prioritized for the supplementation of energy to various components, a WSN might soon dry out. One of the prime focuses of researchers in the field of WSN is the minimization of energy. If the energy can be minimized then the sustainability of the network will be maximized. In this paper, the energy minimization problem has been addressed along with the usage of optimization algorithms.