Honey Ant based cooperative data accumulation in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have found wide acceptance in a range of user applications, due to their ability to monitor ambient conditions without human supervision. These networks typically consist of a large number of densely deployed, low-cost, low-power, multi-functional sensor nodes that interact with each other using wireless links. Despite several limitations in their individual resources, it is well known that, cooperation among sensor nodes can result in large and powerful ad-hoc computing systems. Towards this end, we need to consider among other characteristics, the storage capacity of individual nodes as it is usually very limited, compared to the amount of data that a node generates. Limited storage capability, coupled with temporal availability of sink nodes and varying importance of collected data mean that, the generated data needs to be stored locally, in the network, for later retrieval. To achieve this, we introduce a cooperative storage mechanism that is based on the behavior of Honey Ants in the real world. The proposed technique is based on the concept of data migration and relies on migratory transportation units called Ant Agents to seek out spare storage resources within the network. Simulation results for the proposed model demonstrate that cooperative data accumulation is indeed beneficial for storage constrained nodes in wireless sensor networks.