Abstract
This paper studies how to deploy relay nodes into traditional wireless sensor networks with constraint aiming to simultaneously optimize two important factors; average energy consumption and average network reliability. We consider tackling this multi-objective (MO) optimization problem with three metaheuristics, which employ greatly different evolutional strategies, and aim at an in-depth analysis of different performances of these metaheuristics to our problem. For this purpose, a statistical procedure is employed to analyse the results for confidence, in consideration of two MO quality metrics; hypervolume and coverage of two sets. After comprehensive analysis of the results, it is concluded that NSGA-II provides the best performance.