Investigation On Ant-Colony Based Routing Algorithm For WSN

Recent advances in wireless communications and electronics have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate untethered in short distance. These tiny sensor nodes, which consist of sensing, data processing, and communicating components, leverage the idea of wireless sensor networks (WSN). WSN is a new research area of computer science and technology and will have a variety of applications in the future.Routing in sensor networks is very challenging due to several characteristics that distinguish it from contemporary communication and wireless Ad hoc networks. These characteristics, such as no global address scheme, dynamic topology, extraordinarily limited resource, constrain the development of routing in WSN. Due to such differences, many new algorithms have been proposed for routing data in sensor networks these years. Some routing protocols proposed by oversea researchers are analyzed and compared in the paper and on the basis of assimilating the excellent idea among them, an improved routing algorithm, Ant-Colony Based Routing Algorithm of WSN, is proposed.There are many characteristics of ant algorithm, including easy to be realized, local work, integrating link quality into the computation of the pheromone concentration, supporting multi-path, which make ant-colony algorithm fit for resolving routing problems of WSN. In route discovery phase, an ant-liked packet is broadcast through the network, including the information of monitoring object and area. Each node can get the smallest hops from Sink to itself, which can be called height, and compute the gradient between itself and its neighborhood. The gradient and remaining energy of the neighborhood are integrated into the computation of pheromone concentration. If a node has the right data to send, it becomes a source node. Then the data packet will choose its next hop with...