Routing Protocols Based on Ant Colony Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Routing is one of the important topics in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and has been attracting the research community in the last decade. Routing based on ant colony optimization (ACO) is a type of transmission method rich in characteristics. There are several survey papers that present and compare routing protocols from various perspectives, but the survey on ACO-based routing is still missing. This paper makes a first attempt to provide a comprehensive review on ACO-based routing protocols in WSNs. First, we offer a classification of these routing algorithms. Second, the most representative ACO-based routing protocols are described, discussed, and qualitatively compared. Finally, we put forward some open issues concerning the design of WSNs. This survey aims to provide useful guidance for system designers on how to evaluate and select appropriate routing schemes for specific applications.