Efficient and Secured Ant Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Ant colony based routing algorithms addresses the adaptation of the collective behaviors observed in natural ant colonies for routing in wireless sensor network WSNs, ant swarms usually collectively achieve adaptive, scalable, and robust optimized paths between the net and the source of food with little intelligence and capacities at each individual which is very suitable from WSNs perspective which are composed of small sensors with limited capacities and resources in hostile and unpredictable environment. In this paper, we are going to adapt the conventional ant routing algorithm for WSNs, by taking into consideration their traffic pattern and devices’ constraints. The proposed protocol affects the task of route discovery to the base station which periodically launches forward ants over the network to discover routes and inform sensors about its location instead of letting each sensor doing this task individually which consumes sensors’ resources and decreases the network lifetime due to the broadcasting nature of the forward ants. We have also proposed to execute a handshake during the route discovery in order to secure links between each sensor and the base station, the use of the underlying routing requests for the handshake has considerably saved sensors’ battery power with a good threshold of security. Simulation results in last section show that the proposed solution saves considerably the sensors’ battery power and extend the system lifetime compared to the original ant routing algorithm and AODV.