Ant colony optimization for enhancing scheduling reliability in wireless sensor networks

In the application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy efficiency is always an important topic for extending the network lifetime. Scheduling the operation modes of sensors can reduce the energy wasted by redundant sensors, but frequent alterations of sensors´ modes and different data transmission routes influence the reliability of the WSN. In this paper, a novel algorithm for maximizing the reliable working lifetime of a WSN is proposed. The considered problem restricts the minimum working period of the sensors before changing their operation modes. In order to extend the working lifetime of a reliable WSN, the proposed algorithm adopts the ant colony optimization (ACO) for finding the maximum number of reliable working periods of sensors. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested on various WSNs and compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. The results show that the proposed algorithm can enhance the scheduling reliability of WSNs.