Feedback-enhanced ant colony routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Routing problem in wireless sensor network (WSN) is challenging because WSN has distributed feature, transmission requirement, data redundancy and energy restriction. The idea of ant colony optimization (ACO) has been used in design of routing algorithms for WSN. However, ant colony routing algorithms (ACRs) generally have a serious problem of slow routing discovery so far. In this paper, a feedback-enhanced ant colony routing algorithm (FACR) making use of timed-out forward ants and backward broadcasting ants is proposed to accelerate the routing process. This algorithm is simulated on NS2 and is compared to traditional ant colony routing algorithm (TACR). The results indicate that FACR achieves lower packet loss rate than TACR under the same experimental conditions. Moreover, FACR shows a shorter end to end delay and higher residual energy rate.