Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: an Ant-inspired approach

Abstract

The field of routing and sensor networking is an important and challenging research area of network computing today. Advancements in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable a wide range of environmental monitoring and object tracking applications. Routing in WSN is a challenging task. As the size of the network increases, routing becomes more complex. Therefore, biologically-inspired intelligent algorithms have been taken into consideration to address this problem. Ant routing algorithms have shown excellent performance when applied to WSN routing. This thesis presents routing algorithms in WSN, the current use of swarm intelligence for routing in WSN, explains different ant routing algorithms and shows why some existing ant routing algorithms do not work well for WSN. Consequently, we present four ant-colony based routing algorithms, which are suitable for WSN. Our proposed algorithms take into consideration the WSN requirements, including energy consumption, success rate, and time delay. In addition, one of our algorithms is a multimedia-enabled routing algorithm, which is suitable for single-source-to-single-destination multimedia data traffic to optimize different performance criteria, especially end-to-end delay and jitter. The last proposed algorithm is a many-to-one routing algorithm, which facilitates congestion avoidance in the network. The findings in this thesis are supported with several computer simulations.