Enhancing MR-LEACH protocol using Ant Colony algorithm

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by their sensitivity to complex routing protocols that waste energy. In fact, many ad hoc protocols were experimentally proven to be inconvenient for this type of networks. MR-LEACH is a protocol that governs the sensors data transfer to the base station in a multi-hop hierarchical manner. However, the hierarchical clustering does not achieve a high performance due to the greedy mechanism to establish paths from far cluster heads to the base station. In this paper, we propose a hybrid protocol between MR-LEACH and Ant colony Optimization in order to enhance the hierarchical communication between sensors. Experimental results based on Matlab simulation showed a better enhancement of the hybrid protocol compared to MR-LEACH in terms of lifetime and network stability.