Energy Efficient Routing Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks Using Ant-Colony Optimization

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consists of numerous number of nodes fitted with energy reserves to collect large amount of data from the environment on which it is deployed. Energy conservation has huge importance in wsn since it is virtually impossible to recharge the nodes in their remote deployment. Forwarding the collected data from nodes to the base station requires considerable amount of energy. Hence efficient routing protocols should be used in forwarding the data to the base station in order to minimize the energy consumption thereby increasing the life-time of the network. In this proposed routing protocol, we consider a hierarchical routing architecture in which nodes in the outer-level forwards data to the inner-level nodes. Here we optimized the routing path using ant-colonies where data moves along minimal congested path. Further, when ant-colony optimization is used, certain cluster-head nodes may get overloaded with data forwarding resulting in early death due to lack of energy. To overcome this anomaly, we estimated the amount of data a neighboring Cluster-head can forward based on their residual energy. We compared the energy consumption results of this proposed Routing using Ant Colony Optimization (RACO) with other existing clustering protocols and found that this system conserves more energy thereby increasing lifetime of the network.