IACO‐ERP: An improved ACO‐based energy‐efficient routing protocol for fog‐based WSNs

Abstract

SummaryWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) present numerous constraints, which motivate many researchers and which reside mainly in the fact that their resources are limited in terms of communication, calculations, and energy. In particular, the stress linked to energy is considered as a fundamental problem. Indeed, all the sensor elements need energy to function. Thus, controlling the energy consumption of a node remains a major problem for maximizing the lifetime of the network. The clustering and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms have been seen as a good solution to route data while maintaining a better network lifetime. However, the existing state‐of‐the‐art cluster and ACO‐based routing protocols perform re‐clustering and fail to restrict the ant searching scope. This consumes a high amount of energy and makes the convergence speed slow. For these reasons, this paper presents an Improved ACO‐based Energy‐efficient Routing Protocol (IACO‐ERP) to mitigate the hot spot problem by proposing a multiple Fog Nodes (FNs)‐based energy‐efficient network model. IACO‐ERP avoids re‐clustering and rotates the Cluster Head (CH) role based on energy among cluster members without any need for control overhead, and also, it proposes to limit the scope of ant searching for optimal route toward the sink based on some specific parameters such as energy and distance, thus avoiding routing loop, slow convergence speed, and excessive energy consumption. The proposed routing protocol is evaluated against some recent and relevant existing solutions. The simulations results reveal that IACO‐ERP provides significant improvement in comparison to its counterparts in terms of various main metrics.