Title: A new artificial bee colony algorithm for wireless sensor network coverage optimisation

Authors: Feiyan Fan

Addresses: School of Information Engineering, Jiangxi University of Water Resources and Electric Power, Nanchang, 330099, China

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to enhance the coverage of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The new algorithm called NABC employs three improved strategies. Firstly, an external archive is built, and some best solutions are stored in the archive at each iteration. Secondly, three improved search equations are designed based on the archive. In the search process, these search equations are adaptively chosen to produce offspring. Thirdly, the scout bee search phase is modified by utilising the information of the archive. To validate the search efficiency of NABC, 11 well-known benchmark problems are tested. Computational results show that NABC is superior to five other ABC variants. Finally, NABC is applied to optimise the coverage in WSNs. Simulation results demonstrate that NABC can improve the network coverage and quality of service of WSNs.

Keywords: artificial bee colony; ABC; search strategy; coverage; wireless sensor network; WSN; optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2026.155162

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2026 Vol.27 No.4, pp.220 - 228

Received: 08 Oct 2025
Accepted: 04 Jan 2026
Published online: 28 Jul 2026 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article