Efficient routing in a sensor network using collaborative ants

Abstract

In a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), due to energy constraints and remote deployment in harsh environment, centralized routing is difficult. In a WSN, if more sensors are active better paths are available. But it causes more energy consumption. Conventional shortest path routing causes repeated use of some nodes which causes power failure of those nodes and the routing holes pop up. In our research, we propose an efficient collaborative routing on the improvisation of ant colony meta-heuristics. We construct the best possible routing by building load balanced virtual circuits dynamically. We consider on-demand load condition to the network and span virtual circuits between source-destination pairs using collaborative ants. To validate our method we do experiments, and we also compare our method to a relevant agent based routing technique for WSNs. We find that, our method works better.