Energy Balance Based Uneven Cluster Routing Protocol Using Ant Colony Taboo for Wireless Sensor Networks

To overcome the drawbacks of the short lifetime in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) caused by the imbalanced energy consumption, this paper proposes an efficient ant colony taboo based energy balance routing protocol using uneven cluster (ACTEBUC) for WSNs. The mechanism of temporary cluster head election is improved, the generation of random numbers is optimized, and the energy, distance and density factors are deduced into the threshold value. The real cluster heads are selected based on the node’s competition radius and communication cost that are used for the uneven clustering. Once finishing the cluster, ACTEBUC optimizes ant colony, and improves the probability of selecting next hop node, the pheromone update and the inspiring factor. The pheromone updating is added to the tasks of the forward ant to speed up the convergence rate. The path length is considered when pheromone updating is executed by the backward ant, the ants release more pheromones on the node which is closer to the destination node, which makes the destination node is more likely to be found and speeds up the convergence rate of the algorithm. Meanwhile, a route optimizing algorithm is proposed to increase network lifetime by adjusting the transmission route, and it finds the optimal path to minimize the communication energy consumption. The performance of the proposed algorithm is simulated using MATLAB. Comparing with the results of other algorithms, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently balance the energy consumption, and demonstrate the good performance of the proposed algorithms to increase network lifetime. Also ACTEBUC has the ability to enhance the data transmission reliability.