An Energy Aware Routing Based on Swarm Intelligence for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks consisting of nodes with limited power are deployed to collect and distribute useful information from the field to the other sensor nodes. Energy consumption is a key issue in the sensor’s communications since many use battery power, which is limited. In this paper, we describe a novel energy efficient routing approach which combines swarm intelligence, especially the ant colony based meta-heuristic, with a novel variation of reinforcement learning for sensor networks (ARNet). The main goal of our study was to maintain network lifetime at a maximum, while discovering the shortest paths from the source nodes to the sink node using an improved swarm intelligence. ARNet balances the energy consumption of nodes in the network and extends the network lifetime. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional EEABR algorithm can obviously improve adaptability and reduce the average energy consumption effectively.