An Efficient Device Deployment Strategy for Obstacle-constrained Industrial Internet of Things

Coverage hole is a significant challenge in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) which leads to system disconnection and the inability to monitor critical areas. Effective device deployment is crucial for addressing this issue. While various heuristic, metaheuristic, and machine learning-based approaches were proposed, few pieces of literature address the challenges of real-world IIoT environments with non-penetrable obstacles. To deal with this gap, we introduce a novel strategy for device deployment in IIoT monitoring environments with potential obstacles, called Artificial Bee Colony-based Device Deployment (ABC-DD). The primary objective of ABC-DD is to deploy IIoT devices in a manner that ensures comprehensive system coverage with a minimum number of devices. By using the strengths of the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, ABC-DD optimizes performance criteria, including device overlap, overlap between devices and obstacles, overlap with areas outside the monitoring environment, and inter-device distances. Our strategy enhances IIoT coverage to an average of 83.68