Balancing Energy Dissipation in Data Gathering Wireless Sensor Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization

Formulation of energy efficient protocols is of utmost importance for wireless sensor networks because of energy constraints of sensor nodes. When a number of nodes is deployed in a field located away from the base station, the nodes undergo unequal energy dissipation while transmitting information to the base station primarily due to two reasons: i) the difference in the distances of nodes from the base station and ii) the variation in inter-nodal distances. The schemes presented here better network lifetime by taking into account these two issues and try to equalize the energy dissipation by the nodes. While constructing the chain we also use Ant Colony Optimization algorithm instead of greedy approach used in PEGASIS. Application of ACO ensures that the chain formed is of shortest possible length and thus further helps enhance network performances by reducing the inter-nodal transmission distances as much as possible. Extensive simulations performed corroborates that the proposed schemes outperform PEGASIS by a significant margin.