Survey on swarm intelligence based routing protocols for wireless sensor networks: An extensive study

Swarm Intelligence techniques have been widely used in the science and engineer domains such as Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It is a relatively novel and promising field, focusing on the adaptation of collective behaviors of various natural creatures like ants, fish, birds, and honey bees, and a large number of routing protocols for WSNs have been developed according to the inspiration from the foraging behaviors of these species. In this paper, we first discuss the general principle of swarm intelligence and survey the research efforts on these SI based protocols according to various promising meta-heuristics. In the second part of the paper, we present the properties of termite colony optimization and fission-fusion social structure based spider monkey optimization based clustering in WSNs. Last, we conclude the paper with a comparative analysis, pointing out the fundamental issues and potential future directions.