The Research Of Wireless Sensor Network’s Routing Based On Improved Ant Colony Algorithm

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of a large number of self-organized nodesand the nodes have capability of collecting and processing the information of a specific area.Finally the data will be sent to user terminals through the Sink node. With the development ofsensor technology, embedded technology, MEMS and wireless communication technique,WSN has become a very popular research field with broad prospects of development. Inrecent years, WSN has been used in the extensive field, such as national defense and military,health treatment, environmental monitoring and road detection. Since the energy of sensornodes is limited, the routing protocol of WSN must be energy-efficient and energy-balanced.In this case, the energy consumption of nodes can be reduced and the lifetime of network canbe prolonged. To achieve above goals, this paper presents a new WSN routing algorithmbased on Ant Colony Algorithm Based on Position and Resistance strategy (PRACA).According to this kind of algorithm, a routing protocol of plane wireless sensor network isdesigned.The PRACA algorithm makes the following improvements on the basis of Ant ColonyAlgorithm:(1) An ant will be forwarded according to the location of the candidate nodes, inorder to reduce unnecessary energy consumption wasted in forwarding ants blindly;(2) Theconcept of resisting concentration is introduced in the Ant Colony Algorithm, and theresisting concentration will work together with pheromone trail to determine the next jumpnode and balancing energy consumption among adjacent nodes;(3) The energy consumptionand residual energy of routing paths are considered as indexes to evaluate the pros and cons ofthose paths and these two data will be used to the calculation of pheromone trail on links toprevent a higher-energy path from becoming invalid earlier because of consuming much moreenergy;(4) Make use of collaboration information released by backwards ants to help otherforwards ants look for the Sink node.Finally, we compare the simulation results of the routing protocol based on thePRACA(Energy Efficient Ant Based Routing) algorithm with those of the Flooding Algorithmand the EEABR Algorithm, two traditional routing algorithms. The result of simulation basedon NS2shows that the improved ant-colony based routing protocol has a better performance in reducing energy consumption, balancing energy consumption among nodes and prolongingthe lifetime of network.