An endocrine cooperative particle swarm optimization algorithm for routing recovery problem of wireless sensor networks with multiple mobile sinks

In the wireless sensor networks with multiple mobile sinks, the movement of sinks or failure of sensor nodes may lead to the breakage of the existing routes. In most routing pro-tocols, the query packets are broadcasted to repair a broken path from source node to sink, which cause significant communication overhead in terms of both energy and delay. In order to repair broken path with lower communication overhead, we propose an efficient routing recovery protocol with endocrine cooperative particle swarm optimization algorithm (ECPSOA) to establish and optimize the alternative path. In the ECPSOA, mutation direction of the particle is determined by multi-swarm evolution equation, and its diversity is enriched by the endocrine mechanism, which can enhance the capacity of global search and improve the speed of convergence and accuracy of the algorithm. By using this method, the alternative path from source nodes to the sink with the optimal QoS parameters can be selected. Simulation results show that our routing protocol significantly improves the robustness and adapts to rapid topological changes with multiple mobile sinks, while efficiently reducing the communication overhead and the energy consumption. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.