A Bio-inspired Distributed Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks: Performance Evaluation

Sensor networks are wireless networks with peculiar properties that require specific attention to be properly managed if their performance and dependability have to be taken care of. In fact, both the usually hard environmental conditions where sensors are deployed and the scarcity of node resources determine overall critical working conditions that dramatically impact on parameters such as reliability, fault tolerance, power consumption and scalability. Currently available routing protocols hardly meet all these constraints, because they are not designed in a strong distributed fashion. Swarm intelligence is a science that studies the behavior of social insects characterized by distributed elaboration features, simple computational capacity, flexibility and robustness. In this paper, we propose a routing algorithm based on swarm intelligence, named pheromone protocol (PH-protocol), with some interesting features such as self organization, fault tolerance and environmental adaptation capabilities. To highlight these properties we compared our algorithm against the directed diffusion one, a well known sensor network routing protocol, and measured their performances in terms of reliability, fault tolerance, power consumption and scalability. The obtained results demonstrate that sensor networks greatly benefit from the distributed nature of our PH-protocol, which ensures interesting performance and reliability features.