A new scheme of ant colony system algorithm to discovery optimal solution with flip-flop search

In this study, we propose an ACS with flip-flop search strategy to find the route from source node to destination node in an Ad hoc network topology. A flip-flop search strategy is to alternate the search direction towards either high pheromone area or low pheromone area iteratively in the evolution process. The proposed Flip-Flop search strategy effectively solves the pheromone-excess problem in ACS. The ants are allowed to select reverse path to avoid the ants affected by the high pheromone concentration and disable the ability of discover new search area in routing phase. In simulations, the proposed Flip-Flop Ant Colony System (FFACS) is compared with Traditional Ant Colony System in conditions of various deployment densities and topologies of wireless sensor network. The results show that the FFACS has promising ability of discover new search area to reach the better optimal solution than the TACS has. In addition, the robustness and the stability of FFACS are better than TACS.