A Fusion Multi-Strategy Gray Wolf Optimizer for Enhanced Coverage Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are fundamental to applications in the Internet of Things, smart cities, and environmental monitoring, where coverage optimization is critical for maximizing monitoring efficacy under constrained resources. Conventional approaches often suffer from low global coverage efficiency, high computational overhead, and a tendency to converge to local optima. To address these challenges, this study proposes the fusion multi-strategy gray wolf optimizer (FMGWO), an advanced variant of the Gray Wolf Optimizer (GWO). FMGWO integrates various strategies: electrostatic field initialization for uniform population distribution, dynamic parameter adjustment with nonlinear convergence and differential evolution scaling, an elder council mechanism to preserve historical elite solutions, alpha wolf tenure inspection and rotation to maintain population vitality, and a hybrid mutation strategy combining differential evolution and Cauchy perturbations to enhance diversity and global search capability. Ablation studies validate the efficacy of each strategy, while simulation experiments demonstrate FMGWO’s superior performance in WSN coverage optimization. Compared to established algorithms such as PSO, GWO, CSA, DE, GA, FA, OGWO, DGWO1, and DGWO2, FMGWO achieves higher coverage rates with fewer nodes—up to 98.63% with 30 nodes—alongside improved convergence speed and stability. These results underscore FMGWO’s potential as an effective solution for efficient WSN deployment, offering significant implications for resource-constrained optimization in IoT and edge computing systems.