Maximum lifetime routing based on ant colony algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have several special characteristics such as short transmission range and limited energy. The recent interest in sensor networks has led to a number of routing schemes that use the limited resources available at each sensor nodes more efficiently. In this paper a routing scheme based on ant colony algorithm (ACA), a novel approach to adaptive learning routing is proposed which is inspired by ants bypassing obstacle based on observations on real ants searching for food. The routing scheme concurrently considers the path energy cost and remainder of node along the path and tries finding the tradeoff between them. Also the routing scheme is compared with the directed diffusion (DD) routing. Simulation results show that the routing based on ACA has superior performance under all the experimental conditions with respect to the diffusion routing.