Energy-aware ant routing in wireless multi-hop networks

Many new research areas such as the Internet-of-Things (IoT) propose the interconnection of every days objects, changing the way how we interact with the environment and our world. One key building block of these new research areas are wireless multi-hop networks (WMHNs). Particularly, providing an energy efficient routing is one of the most challenging topics. Algorithms inspired by behavioral patterns found in nature, such as swarm intelligence algorithms, promise to be capable to handling these past and new challenges. We propose an energy-aware ant routing algorithm based on the foraging behavior of ant colonies. While many energy-efficient ant colony based routing algorithms only consider the energy value of future next hops, we provide a new mechanism for estimating the fitness of a path and energy information dissemination. We study the performance of our new algorithm in simulation in comparison to one of the de-facto standard ant routing algorithms.