Ant colony-based many-to-one sensory data routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

An ant colony-based routing protocol is presented in this paper that is specifically designed to route many-to-one sensory data in a multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Because a many-to-one routing paradigm generates lots of traffic in a multi-hop WSN resulting in greater energy wastage, higher end-to-end delay and packet loss, the proposed routing protocol also comes with a lightweight congestion control mechanism, which is capable of handling both event-based and periodic upstream sensory data flow to the base station. The proposed protocol works in two-phases. During the first phase, the protocol uses ant-based intelligence to find and enforce the shortest path and in the second phase, when the actual many-to-one sensory data transmission takes place, the protocol combines the knowledge gained during the first phase with the congestion control mechanism to avoid packet loss and traffic while routing the sensory data. When compared with the related algorithms, the proposed algorithm shows promising results.