Ant colony based routing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks comprises of small sensor nodes communicating with each other in a network topology which keeps on varying. The wireless sensor nodes also known as motes have limited energy resources along with constraints on its computational and storage capabilities. Due to these restrictions coupled with its dynamic topology, routing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a very challenging task. Routing protocols for WSN’s have to ensure reliable multi-hop communication under these conditions. A wide range of adhoc routing algorithms are available for WSN’s. In this paper an adaptation of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique is demonstrated for network routing. This approach belongs to the class of routing algorithms inspired by the behavior of the ant colonies in locating and storing food. The effectiveness of the heuristic algorithm is supported by the performance evaluations. PROWLER, a MATLAB based probabilistic wireless network simulator is used for the calculations. This simulator simulates the transmissions including collisions in ad-hoc radio networks, and the operation of the MAC-layer. The performance metrics are evaluated on RMASE, an application built in PROWLER.