An energy-efficient routing strategy based on mobile agent for wireless sensor network

The access sequence and the number of nodes have a significant impact on the performance of agent-based data gathering in a network. This paper proposes an energy-efficient routing strategy for mobile agent (ERS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). ERS integrates the advantages of clustering and the mobile agent. By constructing a cost function, an optimal route for a mobile agent between the sink and the cluster is obtained. An improved ant colony algorithm (ACA) is presented to form the route for the mobile agent in a cluster. Moreover, a simple scheme that turns off redundant nodes according to the measurement requirement is designed to improve the energy efficacy. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can provide less energy consumption and network delay compared to the traditional algorithms.