An IABC based route maintaining protocol in mobile wireless sensor networks

Recent studies have shown that utilizing a mobile sink to harvest and carry data from wireless sensor network (WSN) can enhance network operations and balance the network energy consumption. Because of the sink mobility, the paths between the sensor nodes and the sink change frequently, and have profound influence on the lifetime of WSN. To find an efficient protocol that can maintain the routes between the mobile sink and nodes with few network resources are important. We propose a swarm intelligent algorithm based route maintaining protocol in this paper to resolve this issue. The protocol utilizes the concentric ring mechanism to guide the route researching direction, and the optimal routing selection to maintain the data delivery route. Using the immune based artificial bee colony (IABC) algorithm to optimize the forwarding path, the protocol could find an alternative path efficiently when sink moves. The results of our experiments demonstrate that the protocol could balance the network traffic load.