Power-Efficient Routing Based on Ant-Colony-Optimization and LMST for In-Network Data Aggregation in Event-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Data routing for in-network data aggregation is an important task in event-based wireless sensor networks. Previous works tackling this routing problem are distributed heuristics to the minimal Steiner tree. They aim to find a multihop routing structures that maximize data aggregation with the minimum number of hops. However, the nodes participating in this routing task don't have to use their maximum transmission powers, but instead, they have the potential to minimize them to conserve more energy. In this article we go further and based on the local minimum spanning tree algorithm and Ant-Colony-Optimization metaheuristic, we propose a novel protocol that aims to define a routing structure which maximizes data aggregation and minimizes the total transmission powers while ensuring a symmetric transmission power assignment to reliably deliver data. The proposal was widely compared to two other known protocols. Simulation results show the superiority of our protocol compared to these protocols.