An Energy-Efficient Routing Mechanism Based On Genetic Ant Colony Algorithm for Wireless Body Area Networks

Abstract

As an important branch of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has received extensive attention of various fields as it is portable and removeable. However, energy consumption is highlighting increasingly as nodes are hard to be recharged or replaced. Up to now, many energy efficient routing algorithms or protocols have been proposed with techniques like clustering, data aggregation and location tracking etc. However, many of them aim to minimize parameters like total energy consumption, latency etc. In order to optimize network routing and prolong the life of network, this paper proposes an energy-efficient routing algorithm in WBAN which is based on Genetic Ant Colony Algorithm (GACA). GACA makes full use of Genetic Agorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Algorithm (ACA). Choosing the optimal routing is to take advantages of both GA and ACA. At the early stage of algorithm, it uses GA to generate the initial pheromone distribution quickly and comprehensively, and then converts the evolved pheromones distribution into pheromones that can be used by ACA and finally uses the positive feedback and parallelism of ACA to find out the optimal solution. It is the fusion of the two algorithms, gaining an improvement of both time and quality. Then it reduces and balances energy consumption for all sensor nodes through a Distance-based Energy Aware Routing (DEAR) algorithm in order to prolong the lifetime of network