Energy consumption optimize based on ant colony algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Limited energy is one of the most special characteristics of WSN, how to use the limited resources available at each sensor node more efficiently is very important. Several researches were done before, aiming to cut down the WSNs´ whole energy consumption, but their simulation results showed that the main node nearest to the sink node always have much higher energy consumption than that of any other nodes, this node will die very quickly, and the whole network will crash because of this node. In this paper, we proposed a new routing mechanism based on ant colony algorithm to average the energy consumption of main nodes. For the new routing mechanism, we considered the whole network´s energy cost and the single node´s energy cost concurrently and tried to look for the best trade between them. As well, we made cooperation between our new routing mechanism and the directed diffusion (DD) routing. Simulation results show that our new routing mechanism can effectively average the main nodes´ energy cost and prolong the whole network´s lifetime.