A Heuristic Algorithm of Cooperative Agents Communication for Enhanced GAF Routing Protocol in WSNs

Abstract

Rapid progress in technologies has led to the development of small sensor nodes. A wireless sensor network (WSN) is an interconnected collection of a large number of these small sensor nodes that is used to monitor and record the physical environment. WSNs have applications in diverse scenarios. They play an important role in tracking and monitoring in different domains, such as environmental research, military, and health care. In most of these applications, the WSN is composed of a large number of nodes deployed in an area of interest, and not all nodes are directly connected to the base station (BS). In some cases, batteries of nodes cannot be recharged or changed. For that, the most solution required to overcome these problems is to optimize energy consumed during communication. Data transmission in networks is maintained by routing protocols, which are responsible for discovering the required paths. This paper presents an improvement of the Geographic Adaptive Fidelity (GAF) routing protocol created on a smart actives node selection. The routing process works on cooperative agents communication where another node is activated in the same grid if the data collected are considered as important data, and a heuristic method is used to find an optimal path in terms of energy to transmit data collected until reaching the BS. Simulation results prove that the cooperative agents GAF (CAGAF) routing protocol proposed is more efficient compared to the basic version in terms of considering important data, energy consumed, and dead nodes.