A dominating set based modified LEACH using Ant Colony Optimization for data gathering in WSN

Data gathering from unreachable terrains such as volcanic area, dense forest, deep sea floor and others are a major application area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The battery operated sensor nodes are of limited energy and it is necessary to preserve their energy to elongate the lifetime of WSN. Hierarchical routing protocols (HRP) like LEACH, PEGASIS disseminate data to the Base Station (BS) by assigning energy intensive data communication to high residual energy nodes while others are engaged in local communication with an overall objective of load balanced and energy efficient data routing. A major drawback of HRP is data redundancy as all nodes gathers data in a round where an area is sensed by multiple nodes. A dominating set formation (DSF) is formulated for constructing a dominating set (DS) from the deployed nodes. We propose a proactive HRP LEACH-DS-ACO by modifying the basic LEACH. DSF is applied to each cluster to obtain its DS from which a cluster chain using ACO is constructed and a chain leader is elected depending on its residual energy and proximity to BS. LEACH-DS-ACO is simulated on MATLAB platform and its performance is compared with LEACH, LEACH-C and PEGASIS. Simulation results indicate that LEACH-DS-ACO outperforms the rest in terms of network lifetime and is also load balanced. The results are shown to be statistically significant.