An Ant Colony Optimization-based Load Balancing Routing Algorithm for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks(WMSNs) have the characteristics of limited resources, variable channel capacities and high data redundancy, which pose great challenges to the QoS routing of WMSNs. Addressing these issues, an Ant Colony Optimization-based Load Balancing Routing Algorithm (ACOLBR) is proposed. Firstly, the intra-cluster routing is built by the minimum spanning tree. And then the inter-cluster routing is built by the improved ant colony optimization algorithm to find an optimal path and some suboptimal paths. Simulation experiments demonstrate that ACOLBR has better scalability, adaptability, load balancing and end-to-end delay compared with AGRA and M-IAR. Therefore ACOLBR can effectively prolong the network lifetime and guarantee the QoS of data transmission.