An Ant Colony Algorithm for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper considers the problem of constructing data aggregation tree in a wireless sensor network for a group of source nodes to send sensory data to a single sink node. Our goal is to minimize the number of non-source nodes in the tree to save energies. In this paper, we propose an ant colony algorithm for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. Every ant will explore some paths from source node to sink node. The data aggregation tree will be constructed by the accumulated pheromone. The simulations have shown that our algorithm can deduce significant energy cost.