Application of an Improved Ant Colony Algorithm in Routing of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks can effectively collect and transmit sensor data, and provide users with a wealth of information. It has broad application prospects in the military, civil and industrial production and so on. Then, it has become one of the hot spots in the current research field. However, compared with other communication networks, wireless sensor networks have some disadvantages, such as no global address mechanism, no dynamic topology and very limited resources. So, after analyzing and comparing some routing protocols, this paper derives the advanced algorithms and proposes a routing algorithm based on ant colony optimization algorithm for wireless sensor networks. The characteristics of self organization, dynamic and multi path of ant colony optimization make it especially suitable for routing in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, a hybrid pheromone updating strategy is adopted. Ant colony algorithm can converge to the optimal solution, it can not only find more feasible solutions, but also maintain the ability to continue to search the optimal solution. In this way, the convergence speed is maintained, and the defect that the update with the global optimal solution is easy to fall into local optimum is overcome. Simulation analysis shows that the algorithm is similar to the directed diffusion algorithm in terms of average transmission delay, but there is a significant improvement in the average energy consumption of the network.