Optimize Energy Consumption of Wireless Sensor Networks by using modified Ant Colony Optimization ACO

TL;DR

This paper proposes a modified Ant Colony Optimization-based routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks that reduces energy consumption and enhances network lifetime by incorporating distance, pheromone levels, and residual energy into the routing decision process.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ACO-based routing protocol with formulation modifications and parameter tuning to optimize energy efficiency in WSNs, validated through extensive experiments.

Findings

Reduced average energy consumption across nodes

Extended network lifetime compared to existing protocols

Improved throughput and data transfer efficiency

Abstract

Routing represents a pivotal concern in the context of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) owing to its divergence from traditional network routing paradigms. The inherent dynamism of the WSN environment, coupled with the scarcity of available resources, engenders considerable challenges for industry and academia alike in devising efficient routing strategies. Addressing these challenges, a viable recourse lies in applying heuristic search methodologies to ascertain the most optimal path in WSNs. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is a well-established heuristic algorithm that has demonstrated notable advancements in routing contexts. This paper introduces a modify routing protocols based on Ant colony optimization. In these protocols, we incorporate the inverse of the distance between nodes and their neighbours in the probability equations of ACO along with considering pheromone levels and residual energy. These formulation modifications facilitate the selection of the most suitable candidate for the subsequent hop, effectively minimizing the average energy consumption across all nodes in each iteration. Furthermore, in this protocol, we iteratively fine-tune ACO's parameter values based on the outcomes of several experimental trials. The experimental analysis is conducted through a diverse set of network topologies, and the results are subjected to comparison against well-established ACO algorithm and routing protocols. The efficacy of the proposed protocol is assessed based on various performance metrics, encompassing throughput, energy consumption, network lifetime, energy consumption, the extent of data transferred over the network, and the length of paths traversed by packets. These metrics collectively provide a comprehensive evaluation of the performance attainments of the routing protocols.