AntMig: A Novel Code Migration Method to Conserve Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks are usually deployed in hostile environments for different purposes like monitoring and target tracking in an ad hoc manner. Due to the processing and storage limitations of tiny nodes codes (procedures) that provide different functionalities can be distributed in the network and make the entire network as a single system. Therefore, nodes have to communicate with each other to demand services which are implemented in another nodes using remote procedure call. Since in the sensor networks, energy consumption is mainly dominated by message passing, keeping highly related codes close to each other can extremely degrade the total energy utilization. In this paper we propose a code migration method, named ANTMIG, inspired from the ant clustering algorithm, to move the codes towards the source of request, considering the dynamic behavior of the network. Observing the local rate and direction of requests, procedures migrate to appropriate nodes that converges to the network minimum energy conservation state. Simulation results show the convergence and flexibility of the algorithm. Moreover, it shows more than fifty percent improvement in power conservation in comparison with the case there is no migration in the network. Although we have proposed our algorithm as a technique for code migration, it can be applied on other problems like data centric routing and data storage in wireless sensor networks, while the source of request changes time to time.