2009 International Conference on Environmental Science and Information Application Technology

A Novel Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks based on Ant Colony Optimization
Naval University of Engineering Department of Information Security HuBei China e-mail : xiehui_791121@163.com
AbstractThe applications of Wireless Sensor Networks are seriously constrained by energy supply. So how to prolong the network lifetime is an important and challenging issue, which is the focus of designing the WSNs routing protocol. We propose an approach of the wireless sensor network routing protocol based on ant colony optimization. The ACO approach consider not only the path delay but also the node energy and the frequency a node acting as a router to achieve a dynamic and adaptive routing, which can effectively balance the WSNs node power consumption and increase network lifetime as long as possible. Simulation results have show the ACO routing protocol significantly improves the network lifetime. Keywords - Wireless Sensor Networks, Routing Protocol, Network Lifetime, Ant Colony Optimization
1

Xie Hui 1

Zhang Zhi-gang 2 Zhou Xue-guang 1

Naval University of Engineering Department of Communication Engineering HuBei China e-mail : submarine106@yahoo.com.cn which leads to rapid energy depletion of the nodes on the path. To overcome this problem, we propose a routing protocol which considers not only the path delay but also the node energy and the frequency a node acting as a router to increase network lifetime as long as possible. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol for WSNs. The main goal of our study is to prolong the network lifetime as well as discover the best path from the source node to the sink based on ant colony optimization. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2, a summary of ant colony optimization (ACO) is explained. In section 3, the proposed approach based on ant colony optimization is presented. Section 4 compares the performance of ACO approach with two popular sensor network routing protocols: SPEED protocol and EAR protocol to demonstrate the increased WSNs lifetime. And the conclusion of the work and future directions are provided in the last section. II. ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION Research shows that ants have the ability to select the shortest path among few possible paths connecting their nest to a food site. The pheromone, a volatile chemical substance laid on the ground by the ants while walking and affecting in turn their moving decisions according to its local intensity, is the mediator of this behavior. At the beginning, no pheromone is laid on the branches and the ants do not have any bit of information about the branches length. However, since one branch is shorter than the other, the shorter branch receives pheromone at a higher rate than the longer one. As ants can smell pheromone, and their probabilistic decisions are based in favor of paths marked with higher amount of pheromone. Eventually, the shorter path will be selected by almost all ants of the colony. These complex global behaviors are the result of self-organizing dynamics driven by local interactions and communications among a number of relatively simple individuals. The simultaneous presence of these and other fascinating and unique characteristics have made ant societies an attractive and inspiring model for building new algorithms and new multi-agent systems. At the beginning of the 1990's, Marco Dorigo and his co-workers first exploit this characteristic of real ant colonies to solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems and named it ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm [4].
2

I. INTRODUCTION With the advances in processor, memory, and wireless communication, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has been emerged as a promising technology to help human perform many tasks such as environment and habitat monitoring, health-care application, traffic control, or wild ecological survey [1]. Although WSN is used in many applications, it has many restrictions such as limited energy supply, limited computation and limited communication abilities. So various routing protocols have been designed and developed for WSNs because the routing in WSNs is distinguished from other networks. First, due to the relatively large number of sensor nodes, it is impossible to build a global addressing scheme for the deployment of a large number of sensor nodes. Thus, traditional IP-based protocols may not be applied to WSNs. Second, sensor nodes are tightly constrained in terms of energy, processing, and storage capacities. So they require careful resource management. Third, as node failure is occurred frequently in WSNs which results in unpredictable and frequent topological changes. So the routing protocol must adapt to frequent changes of the WSNs topology. Finally, sensor nodes regularly send data through broadcast, there is a high probability that this data has some redundancy. Such redundancy needs to be exploited by the routing protocols to improve energy and bandwidth utilization. In the above-mentioned requirements, minimizing energy consumption is considered as a major performance criterion in the WSN, because recharge or replace the battery of all the sensors is undesirable or even impossible such as desert or battlefield [2][3]. But the problem in existing energy aware routing protocols is that they try to discover an optimal path and then frequently use the optimal path for every communication,
978-0-7695-3682-8 2009 U.S. Government Work Not Protected by U.S. Copyright DOI 10.1109/ESIAT.2009.460

646

The ant colony optimization algorithm combines such characteristics as quick problem-solving, global optimization as well as the high degree of self-organization. And it is very similar to the requirements of low-power, self-organization and quickly routing in wireless sensor networks. This caused us to explore the overall energy balance of the wireless sensor network routing protocol based on ant colony algorithm. III. PROPOSED ACO APPROACH The ACO routing protocol is composed of three phases: (1)Neighbor Discovery Neighbor Discovery is initiated by the destination node. When the destination node receives an interest the node launches a neighbor discovery mechanism. Broadcast packets are flooded through the entire network until it reaches the source node to find all the routes from destination to source. This is when routing tables are built up. (2) Routing and Data Transmission Data is sent from source to destination, using the information from the earlier phase. This is when paths are chosen probabilistically according to the path delaythe node energy and the frequency a node acting as a router. (3) Route maintenance Route maintenance phase flood of inquiries through the destination node to the source node to maintain the activities of all paths and update their routing tables. If the node energy below a certain threshold, we can make the node on standby. A. Neighbour Discovery The destination node launches neighbor discovery mechanism. During this process broadcast packets are exchanged between the nodes. The broadcast packet is shown in Figure 1.

contains the same fields as those of the request packet, as well as an expected receive time field indicating the time reach the target node. Unlike the broadcast message, the route reply packet does not rely on flooding to find its return path back to the source; it just uses the nodes through which it received the broadcast message [6]. The process continues, until each node know the path delay and the remaining energy of the neighbor nodes. These messages mainly provide a reference for routing. B. Routing and Data Transmission In routing and data transmission phase, when node s sends data towards destination node d, it in node i chooses the next node j to move to according to a probabilistic decision rule (equation 3), whereij is the value of pheromone,ij is the value of heuristic related to energy andij is the path delay. , andare three parameters that control the relative weight of pheromone trail , energy heuristic value and path delay.
1 1 [ ] [ ij ] [ ] ij ij 1 1 Pij = [ ][ il ] [ ] ij ij lJi 0

j M

(3)

otherwise

After a transfer completed, pheromone evaporation is triggered, and then each ant deposits a quantity of pheromone on each path that it has used: ij
1 / L ij = 0 if (i, j ) T k otherwise

(4)

where Tk is the tour done by ant k at iteration t, and L is its length. The amount of pheromone on each connection of the nodes is given in equation 5. ij

+ ij ij

(5)

Figure 1: Broadcast packet frame format

The broadcast packets consists of the information of send time and receive time, and the packet delay equal to receive time subtract send time. Each intermediate node forwards the request only to the neighbors that are closer to the source node than oneself and farther away from the destination node [5]. Thus at a node i, the request is sent only to a neighbor j which satisfies: (1) d(i,s)d(j,s) (2) d(i,d)d(j,d) Where d(i,j)is the distance between node i and node j. The destination node, once received a new broadcast message, will reply with a route reply packet. The header of this packet

To avoid cycling in a route path, every node maintains a memory Mk that contains the nodes already visited. When a node received data, it can make a decision by comparing the Src ID and its memory Mk whether it has received previously or not. The energy heuristic valueij for the node j is expressed by equation 6.

ij =

ej
n N i

en

(6)

Where ej is the energy level of node j. This enables an ant to make a decision according to neighbor nodes energy levels meaning that if a node has a lower energy source then it has lower probability to be chosen [7]. After updating the pheromone and energy levels, the routing table is recalculate .The routing table of each node is described as probability, as shown in table I. The probability to choose a

647

neighbor node in table I is expressed by equation 3.

TABLE I NODE PROBABILITY ROUTING TABLE destination node 1 2 M neighbour node
1 2 L

Ea

E k =1 ik N

E fk

(7)

P11 P21 PM1

P12 P22 PM2

P1L P2L PML

Due to the choice of route is derived from the above-mentioned parameters dynamically; therefore, the routing protocol has a very good adaptive performance [8]. It can automatically adapt to the energy of each node of WSNs and pheromone changes to achieve dynamic routing choice in order to increase the network lifetime as long as possible. IV. SIMULATION AND DISCUSSION This section of the paper discusses the simulation of the proposed routing protocol and evaluates its performance. To be able to evaluate the implementation of the proposed ACO routing, simulation was carried out in GloMoSim2.0, a scalable discrete-event simulator developed by UCLA [9]. This software provides a high fidelity simulation for wireless communication with detailed propagation, radio and MAC layers. We compare the ACO routing protocol with two popular sensor network routing protocols: SPEED protocol and EAR (Energy Aware Routing) protocol to demonstrate the increased WSNs lifetime. Sensor nodes are randomly distributed over a 5000 m 5000 m area. Initially, one unit of energy is assigned to every node. The battery consumptions of full power transmitting and receiving are 0.005 unit and 0.0005 unit. The effective radio range is 300 meters. The parameters ,andcould have the values 1, 5and 1. The simulation mainly considered the performance parameters are average energy consumption and node operational time. So, we compare these two performance parameters with the SPEED protocol and EAR protocol. A. Average Energy Consumption The average energy consumption (E a) measures the average difference between the initial level of energy and the final level of energy that is left in each node in a network lifetime [10]. Network lifetime here use the definition of reference [5], it is the time till the first node runs out of energy. Assume E i represents the initial energy level of a node, E f represents the final energy level of a node and N = number of nodes in the simulation. E a can be expressed by equation 7.

Average Energy Consumption

When the source node transmits the data to the destination node, it will select a path according to the probability in table I. The smaller the path delay, the greater the energy of the next node, as well as the lower the concentration of pheromone on the path, the greater the probability to be selected to forward.

The number of nodes in the average energy consumptions simulation is ranging from20 to 120 nodes in increments of 20 nodes [11]. Figure 2 show that SPEED protocol performs the worst. EAR has nearly the same power consumption as ACO routing when the number of nodes is less. As the network density becomes higher, ACO routing will deliver a better performance. An increased network density means more neighbors per node on average. Hence, ACO routing will have more candidate nodes to choose from to determine a desirable routing path.

Figure 2: Energy Consumption Vs Node Density

B. Node Operational Time The node operational time is defined as when the energy of any node is depleted. To simulate the node operational time, we set fifty sensor nodes randomly distributed in above area.
As can be seen from Figure 3node using SPEED protocol emerge energy depletion at an earlier time [12]. This is due to the protocol uses more control costs and make use of a high-speed link to transmit data packets as far as possible, resulting in network congestion. Network congestion increased energy consumption of sensor nodes, and shortened the network lifetime. While EAR protocol maintains a number of paths, rather than using an optimum path. It chooses a path by a certain probability, and the value of the probability depends on each path energy situation, so as to prevent over-reliance on a certain path and excessive energy consumption on such path. In this way, the EAR increased the network lifetime to a certain extent. ACO routing protocol takes full account of the balance node energy consumption. It emphasizes considering the node energy and the frequency a node acting as a router to maximize the number of survival nodes thus increased the network lifetime.

648

SPEED

EAR

ACO

40

30

20 0 5 10 15 20 Number of Stop working Nodes

Figure 3: Number of Stop working Nodes Vs Node Operational Time

V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we presented a new WSNs routing protocol by using ACO algorithm to balance the node power consumption and increase network lifetime as long as possible. The idea behind the protocol is simpleusing the lowest energy path always is not necessarily best for the long-term health of the network, because it would cause the optimal path quickly get energy depleted [14]. Thus we adopt ACO algorithm to establish a global balanced energy routing protocol. The ACO approach considers not only the path delay but also the node energy and the frequency a node acting as a router to achieve a dynamic and adaptive routing. Among them, in order to balance the global energy and to avoid too focused on routing through a certain node; we select the node of lower pheromone as the next hop and do not have to consider the factors of pheromone decay. This is the significant difference between ACO routing and other traditional ACO routing algorithm. Since current research in WSNs routing techniques focus on the common objective of prolonging the network lifetime. It includes a measure of the network lifetime as well as the kind of service it provides during its life. Both these factors are important in evaluating networks and neither can be considered in isolation. Further research would be needed to address issues such as Quality of Service (QoS). Another interesting issue for routing protocols is the consideration of node mobility. New routing algorithms are needed in order to handle the overhead of mobility and topology changes in such energy constrained environment. REFERENCES
[1] I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E. Cayirci, .A Survey on Sensor Networks,. IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 40, no. 8, pp. 102.114, Aug. 2002. [2] A. Sinha and A. Chandrakasan, .Dynamic power management in wireless sensor network,. IEEE Design & Test of Computers, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 62.74, Mar. 2001. [3] J.-H. Chang and L. Tassiulas, .Maximum lifetime routing in wireless sensor networks,. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 12, no. 4, pp.

609.619, Aug. 2004. [4] Gianni Di Caro and Marco Dorigo, AntNet: Distributed Stigmergic Control for Communication Networks. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 9, 1998. [5] R. C. Shah and J. Rabaey, .Energy Aware Routing for Low Energy Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks,. in Proceedings of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), vol. 1, Orlando, FL, Mar. 2002, pp. 350.355. [6] T. He, J. A. Stankovic, C. Lu, and T. F. Abdelzaher, .A spatiotemporal communication protocol for wireless sensor networks,. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 16, no. 10, pp. 995.1006, Oct. 2005. [7] Selcuk Okdem Dervis Karaboga, .Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Ant Colony Optimization,. in Proceedings of the First NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS'06) [8] I. Stojmenovic and X. Lin, .Power-aware localized routing in wireless networks,. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 12, no. 10, pp. 1.12, Oct. 2001. [9] Takai M., Bajaj L., Ahuja R., Bagrodia R., and Gerla M., GloMoSim: A Scalable Network Simulation Environmen, Technical report 990027, UCLA, Computer Science Department, 1999. [10] http://www.dcc.ufla.br/infocomp/artigos/v6.3/art02.pdf [11] T. Bokareva, N. Bulusu and S. Jha, A performance comparison of data dissemination protocols for wireless sensor networks, Proceedings of Globecom 2004, IEEE Press, 2004, pp. 85--89. [12] C. K. Toh, Maximum battery life routing to support ubiquitous mobile computing in wireless ad hoc networks, IEEE Comm. Mag., June 2001, pp. 138-147. [13] Manjeshwar A., and Agrawal D.P., TEEN: A Protocol for Enhanced Efficiency in Wireless SensorNetworks, .1st International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Issues in Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, 2001 [14] Ying C., Lu Q., Liu Y., and Shi M., Routing Protocols Overview and Design Issues for Self-Organized Network, . in Proceedings of International Conference on Communication Technology (WCC - ICCT), Vol 2, pp. 1298-1303, 2000

649