ABSTRACT
At present, the study on the routing protocol of WSN (wireless sensor network)
was around the static WSN (sensor nodes are fixed). As the movement of nodes in
MWSN (mobile wireless sensor network) can easily lead to changes of network
topology and routing path breaks or fails, therefore, most routing protocols of static
WSN can not be applied to MWSN. So, we proposed a multi-path routing protocol on
ACO (ant colony optimization) which are based on cluster distinguish in MWSN.
The main idea of the new protocol is to break down a complex problem into small
ones. This article introduces a MWSN model which was designed based on the
clustering technology. The distinguishing feature of this model is that it has the effect
to separate the network into two parts. The one part of the net is consists of mobile
nodes and the other is consists of fixed nodes. Therefore, the routing problem of the
MWSN is broken down into two sub-problems, the data transferring problems in the
mobile nodes layer and the fixed nodes layer. To the mobile nodes layer, we use the
clustering technology to separate the mobile nodes into clusters, and the nodes whose
energy is larger then the average of the clusters and closer to the reference fixed nodes
are selected to be the head nodes. So, clusters are formed. And when in data
transferring, common nodes transfer sensed data to cluster head and cluster head
transfer the merged data to the nearest reference fixed node in each cluster. To the data
transfer problem of fixed nodes, it is the same like the traditional routing problem of
WSN. As fixed nodes are running in the whole process of data transferring, so its
energy consumes very quickly. To solve this problem, we proposed a multi-path
routing algorithm based on ant colony optimization (ACO) in this article. In this
algorithm: data can be transferred on different paths by the effect of pheromone on the
paths and heuristic in the nodes to improve the transmission efficiency and balance
nodes’ energy consumption; there is also an information verification mechanism to
increase the reliability of data transmission.
In order to verify the performance of the new algorithm, we had compared it with
LEACH-M which is usually the object to be compared with in the routing protocol
research of MWSN by the simulation soft of NS2. We had mainly compared two
algorithms in two aspects: the life of network and the data transfer success rate. The
results of the simulation are: the new algorithm improves the network life and elevate
the reliability of the data transmission.
Key words:wireless sensor network, mobile WSN, ACO, clustering,
multi-path