Ant colony inspired self-optimized routing protocol based on cross layer architecture for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Nowadays, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming increasingly beneficial, worthwhile and a challenging research area. The advancements in WSN enable a wide range of environmental monitoring and object tracking applications. Moreover, multihop (node by node) routing in WSN is affected by new devices constantly entering or leaving the network. Therefore, nature inspired self-maintained protocols are required to tackle the problems arising in WSN. We proposed ant colony stimulated routing, which shows an outstanding performance for WSNs. In this manuscript, a cross layer design based self-optimized (ACO) routing protocol for WSN and the results are presented. Link quality, energy level and velocity parameters are used to discover an optimal route. The signal strength, remaining power and timestamp metrics are trade in from physical layer to network layer. The emitted decision through the WSN discovery will establish the optimal route from source to destination. The adopted cross layer architecture helps ACO in improving the overall data delivery ratio; especially in the case of real time traffic.