Swarm Intelligence based Hierarchical Routing Protocols Study in WSNs

The applications of Wireless Sensor Networks have been envisioned in numerous spheres of life in modern time. Wireless sensors enabled IoT based applications are changing the way modern life is being lived with applications into battle field surveillance, habitat monitoring, structural health, monitoring of vital parameters of human body and many more. Major constraint with these resource constrained networks is energy depletion during transmission of information with energy depletion increasing as the distance to which data is communicated increases. Energy efficient routing protocols have proved to be a formidable mechanism to save energy in WSNs. Moreover, hierarchical routing protocols are considered to be providing highest energy efficiency among all types of routing protocols. In recent times extensive research on nature inspired, swarm intelligence-based routing protocols has been observed. These optimization-based protocols not only have been established to be more energy efficient but have also performed better on several performance parameters including throughput, packet delivery ratio, delay and other QoS parameters, thus optimizing energy and other QoS based factors in a Wireless Sensor Network. This paper presents a taxonomy of approaches based on swarm intelligence and a analyzes the state-of-the-art swarm intelligence-based hierarchical routing protocols.