Ant colony system based clustering routing algorithm for large-scale wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received a lot of attentions recently due to their wide applications. The major motivation to improve the routing performance of wireless sensor networks is due to the constraints of energy supplying and computation, especially for the large-scale WSNs. So an ant colony system based clustering routing algorithm is presented. Firstly the network is clustered into some small-scale regional clusters according to the distribution characteristics of the nodes. Then it applies the ant colony system algorithm parallel to search for the optimal path for each region cluster and determines the centers of the region clusters. Finally it forms the optimal data transmission paths according to the optimal regional path solutions and the sequence of the centers of the region clusters by applying the ant system again. It greatly improves the computational performance and gives an important inspiration to the routing establishment to large-scale wireless sensor networks by decomposing the global solution of the whole task into the sub-problems´ solutions according to the clustering features applying the ant colony system. The time complexity analysis and simulations show the good performance of the algorithm.