Swarm intelligence based energy saving greedy routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy consumption is crucial. Routing plays a very high role for energy optimization, as taking less hop numbers usually leads to a better performance. The main goal of this paper is to provide an energy saving routing algorithm that is simple to understand and implement, and that is inspired by the work in the field of swarm intelligence. Basing on the idea that transmission consumes more energy than processing, the routing algorithm avoids this by only sending updates to neighbors when a critical event occurs (e. g. the node´s energy dropping to zero), with the objective that this type of events do not impact negatively in the network. The selection of a path is based on the neighbor with fewer hops and less pheromone concentration, to avoid overusing of a route, all this being calculated by each node´s own processing.