RIVER: A Bio Inspired Routing Protocol For High Data Rate Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are deployed to observe the environment such as disaster management facilities and some industrial applications to observe temperature, pressure and humidity etc. The network is dynamic, battery operated and as a result it phases many issues compared to other networks like MANETs. Compared to MANETs, the issue or challenges are more as the nodes in the network has to send data to a common node called sink node. The challenges increases if the data type is other than scalar data. In future WSN gets extended to high data rate applications to sense and transmit multimedia, image or audio files. Normal routing algorithms, which are currently suitable for low data rate WSNs (LWSNs) are not sufficient for HWSNs. As a result, a new type of routing protocol which can solve various issues of HWSN is essential. It has been found that bio inspired algorithms perform very well for optimization and combinatorial problems. Bio-inspired algorithms are inspired from nature and nature has found very good solutions to very complex problems. In this regard, we are proposing and developing a new bio inspired routing protocol for high data rate wireless sensor networks called River which is based on the Intelligent Water Drops algorithm related to swarm intelligent techniques. The proposed method is implemented in ns-2, and the results are compared with AODV. The results shows on an average 75% improvement with respect to various parameters.