Enhanced Ant Colony algorithm for self-optimized data assured routing in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) deploys tiny wireless sensor nodes to communicate with each other with limited processing speed, power and security measures. A recent WSN routing protocol defined as Secure Real-Time Load Distribution (SRTLD) has been developed to provide realtime transfer, high delivery ratio, and longer sensor node lifetime. SRTLD has been compared with LQER, MMSpeed, RTPC and RPAR. However, SRTLD uses broadcast packets to perform neighbour discovery for every packet transfer every hop, thus consume high energy. A novel Biological inspired self-organized Secure Autonomous Routing Protocol (BIOSARP) to enhance SRTLD with self-optimized and autonomous secure routing mechanism. The BIOSARP routing protocol depends on the optimal forwarding decision obtained by Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The pheromone value in ACO is computed based on end-to-end delay, remaining battery power, and packet reception rate metrics similar to SRTLD. The proposed BIOSARP has been designed to reduce overhead broadcast packet in order to minimize the delay, packet loss and power consumption in WSN. In this paper we have presented the improved ACO algorithm that has been utilized in BIOSARP to perform self-optimized routing in WSN. BIOSARP has been studied and verified through simulation in network simulator 2 (NS-2). In simulation study BIOSARP normalized overhead is 12.1% less as compare to E&D ANTS and achieves 14% higher delivery ratio with 9% less power consumption when compared to SRTLD. Hence, the results confirm that BIOSARP offers better performance and can be practically implemented in WSN applications as structural and environmental monitoring, battlefield surveillance.