Impact of Random Waypoint Mobility Model on Ant-based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of static or mobile nodes, depending on the application requirements. The weaknesses of sensors node with mobility present major challenges especially in routing. In many cases, routing in WSNs is considered as NP-hard optimization problem that needs efficient and robust methods such as metaheuristics. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is one of the most used meta-heuristics for solving this problem in static WSN. For dynamic WSN, the random waypoint (RWP) model is widely proposed to evaluate the performance of mobile networks. In this paper, we present a new evaluation of the RWP mobility model impact on ant-based routing protocol for WSN, using different parameters like the number of user nodes, simulation time and simulation area. Further, this study estimates the performance of the ACO routing protocol for mobile WSNs.