An Improved Ant-Based Algorithm for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is an important issue in wireless sensor networks which gathers and routes information through a multi-hop network and processes data at intermediate nodes. This paper considers how to construct data aggregation tree in wireless sensor network where there are several source nodes and a single sink. Ant Colony Optimization algorithm is an effective distributed approach. It has been applied to the design of data-centric routing algorithm and got many achievements, but still have some shortcomings. To overcome the flaws of current ant-based data-centric routing algorithms, we proposed an improved algorithm to provide the least nodes involved in data transmission and get aggregation nodes as much as possible. The simulation results in TOSSIM show that the proposed algorithm reduces routing overhead, transmitting overhead and average delay greatly.