BeeSensor: An energy-efficient and scalable routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Design and development of power-aware, scalable and performance-efficient routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an active area of research. In this paper, we show that insect-colonies-based-intelligence – commonly referred to as Swarm Intelligence (SI) – serves as an ideal model for developing routing protocols for WSNs because they consist of minimalist, autonomous individuals that through local interactions self-organize to produce system-level behaviors that show life-long adaptivity to changes and perturbations in an external environment. In this paper, we propose bee-inspired BeeSensor protocol that is energy-aware, scalable and efficient. The important contribution of this work is a three phase protocol design strategy: (1) we first take inspiration from biological systems to develop a distributed, decentralized and simple routing protocol, (2) we formally model important performance metrics of our protocol to get an analytic insight into its behavior, and (3) we improve our protocol on the basis of our analysis in phase 2. We then evaluate its performance in a sensor network simulator. The results of our experiments demonstrate the utility of this three phase protocol engineering, which helped BeeSensor in achieving the best performance with the least communication and processing costs – two main sources of energy consumption in sensor networks – as compared to other SI based WSN routing protocols.