A Monte Carlo Enhanced PSO Algorithm for Optimal QoM in Multi-Channel Wireless Networks

In wireless monitoring networks, wireless sniffers are distributed in a region to monitor the activities of users. It can be used for fault diagnosis, resource management and critical path analysis. Due to hardware limitations, wireless sniffers typically can only collect information on one channel at a time. Therefore, it is a key topic to optimize the channel selection for sniffers to maximize the information collected, so as to maximize the quality of monitoring (QoM) of the network. In this paper, a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based solution is proposed to achieve the optimal channel selection. A 2D mapping particle coding and its moving scheme are devised. Monte Carlo method is incorporated to revise the solution and significantly improve the convergence of the algorithm. The extensive simulations demonstrate that the Monte Carlo enhanced PSO (MC-PSO) algorithm outperforms the related algorithms evidently with higher monitoring quality, lower computation complexity, and faster convergence. The practical experiment also shows the feasibility of this algorithm.