An Energy-balanced Ant-Based Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing algorithm design and energy distribution are the key problems in wireless sensor networks, so this paper proposed an energy-balanced ant based routing algorithm, which can balance the energy consumption among sensor nodes and improve the ability to seek the excellent global result. Firstly, the search angle is introduced into the basic ant colony algorithm to update the pheromone heuristic function. In this way, the search path is limited and then the node energy consumption is saved. Secondly, the upper and lower limits of pheromone concentration are set. The node residual energy threshold becomes adaptive, so the pheromone increment formula is optimized to save energy consumption and improve global optimization capability. The simulations show that when the algorithm is applied into two scenarios, the improved algorithm can reduce the average node energy consumption by 15.12% and 11.68% and shorten the optimal path length by 1.47% and 1.59%. The considerable results demonstrate that the improved algorithm effectively balances the power consumption among sensor nodes and has a better global optimization ability to extend the network lifetime vastly.