An implementation case study on ant-based energy efficient routing in WSNs

Abstract

The earlier era of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is extending its hands towards Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). The emergence of new technologies using WSNs leads to the dire need of real-time implementations to be utilized in typical applications like health care, agriculture, industries, and much more. These sensors are generally characterized by several limitations such as limited energy availability, low memory, and reduced processing power. Routing in WSNs is a well-studied research domain leaving several holes for further research. A large number of network routing algorithms have been developed to effectively pass the sensor data from individual nodes to base station. This paper presents an implementation case study using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) heuristic for an energy efficient routing in WSNs. The real-time experiments were carried out using iSense proprietary hardware and software platform for WSNs. Many practical challenges like neighbor detection failure, packet loss, interference from external objects were taken into consideration and ACO algorithm was modified accordingly to successfully solve those problems. The results achieved are reported in this paper.