An Ant Colony Optimization Approach to Power Allocation in wireless sensor networks

The ant colony optimization algorithm is good at solving multidimensional optimization problem. The allocation of power resource of a node in wireless sensor networks should make the detection performance of the whole network maximum, which is complex due to the detection probability of the whole system cannot be expressed explicitly. Therefore, continuous ant colony system (CACS) is adopted to optimize the allocation of each node's power between sensing and communications. The results show that it can lead to a good power allocation. At the same time, the scheme that all sensor nodes have identical power assignment can achieve nearly the same detection performance as compared that achieved by the best scheme searched by CACS. As a result, particularly for a large number of sensors, an identical power allocation scheme for each node can be employed to achieve nearly the best detection performance.