A Comprehensive Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Network Based on Ant Colony Algorithm

This paper proposes a comprehensive routing protocol (CRP) based on the ant colony algorithm for the applications of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). It is a protocol taking both the lifetime of network and the arrival rate of data packet into account. In CRP, multiple paths are found between source and destination, and sub-optimal paths are used occasionally referring to the probabilistic forwarding table to provide substantial gains. To ascertain the probability of the candidate node to be chosen as the next forwarding one, these factors such as the remained energy of the node, the square of distance between it and the current node, and the strength of pheromone on this branch are considered to balance the energy consumption between nodes. Moreover, to guarantee the success of message transmission, the reputation of nodes on the routing path is critical. Therefore, the frequency a node acting as a router which represents its reputation is also considered as one of the decision factors. Simulation results have shown that the proposed protocol not only prolongs the network lifetime, but also decreases the packet loss rate.