Ant-Colony Optimization Based In-Network Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In-network data aggregation is an important technique for data collection in wireless sensor networks. It improves energy efficiency and alleviates congestive routing traffic by eliminating data redundancy in the message forwarding process. Ant-colony aggregation is a distributed algorithm that provides an intrinsic way of exploring the search space to optimize settings for optimal data aggregation. This paper aims to refine the heuristic function and the aggregation node selection method to maximize energy efficiency and to extend network lifetime. Two proposed algorithms are shown to yield longer maximum lifetime than the conventional algorithm with the same hop-count delay. One of the proposed algorithms is shown to have improved scalability than the conventional algorithm.