An Energy-Efficient Multipath Routing Algorithm Based on Ant Colony Optimization for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

An energy-efficient ACO-based multipath routing algorithm (EAMR) is proposed for energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. EAMR is a hybrid multipath algorithm, which is reactive in path discovery and proactive in route maintenance. EAMR has improvement and innovation in the ant packet structure, pheromone update formula, pheromone update mode, and the mechanism of multipath. Average energy consumption and congestion of path make pheromone update formula more reasonable. Incremental pheromone update mode may easily lead to local optimum. The pheromone will be thoroughly updated when a node receives a backward ant. EAMR makes an innovation in multipath mechanism which becomes more reasonable to multipath between source node and destination node. Probabilistic routing mechanism is designed to make stream flow into network more balanced. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an improvement in energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay.