AntSens: An Ant Routing Protocol for Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Large scale wireless sensor networks, consisting of thousands of nodes spread over a large geographical area, are being planned for a number of monitoring and control applications. The individual nodes in such networks would be severely limited in their capabilities - they will have limited memory and CPU resources and would typically run on batteries. A suitable routing protocol for large wireless sensor networks should scale well with the size of the network in terms of the control packet, memory and processing overhead. Dynamic link/node characteristics, such as PHY/MAC loss rates and battery levels, in such networks require continuous monitoring of the quality of existing routes and frequent discovery of new routes. The routing protocol should allow distribution of traffic load through out the network to avoid artificial congestion, and hence high MAC level loss rates, in parts of the network. The existing routing protocols do not meet all the criteria mentioned above. Hence, we propose a new routing protocol meeting the criteria mentioned above. The proposed protocol, called AntSens, may be considered as belonging to the category of ant routing protocols that are based on the manner ants discover and remember the best routes to the food location.