IEEMARP: Improvised Energy Efficient Multipath Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) being special type of wireless communication networks, characterized via various specific features like Limited Memory, Energy, Less Processing power. In Wireless Sensor Networks, every sensor node actively participates in routing work by forwarding the packets from sender to receiver and the packet forwarding is entirely based on network topology. One of the most important issue surrounding WSNs is Energy Efficiency and Efficient Routing mechanism which should be dynamic and efficient enough to handle changing topologies. So, there is utmost need for optimization techniques which can lay the foundation of development of suitable routing protocol to attain energy efficiency and routing in sensor networks. Swarm Intelligence is one the most important technique which is highly considered for developing energy efficient routing protocols. Considering Swarm Intelligence, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique is utilized to propose Energy Efficient protocol for WSN. In this paper, a Novel Energy Efficient Routing Protocol based on ACO for WSN is proposed i.e. IEEMARP (Improvised Energy Efficient Multipath Ant Based Routing Protocol). Hardcore testing of protocol proposed i.e. IEEMARP is done in different simulation scenarios using NS-2 simulator on varied parameters like Packet Delivery Ratio, Throughput, Routing Overhead, Energy Consumption and End-To-End Delay and performance is compared with other routing protocols like Basic ACO, DSDV, DSR, ACEAMR, Ant Chain, EMCBR and IACR. The results states that IEEMARP is almost 7 to 10 times better in different parameters. It has also been observed that IEEMARP routing protocol is also efficient in transmitting TCP packets.