IEEMARP- a novel energy efficient multipath routing protocol based on ant Colony optimization (ACO) for dynamic sensor networks

In the past few years, research and development in Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs) have gained momentum due to its numerous applications in agriculture, industrial manufacturing, military surveillance, environmental monitoring, consumer electronics, medical & healthcare, disaster recovery operations etc. Dynamic WSNs offer a robust blend of distributed sensing, computing and communication. Dynamic sensor networks are characterized by large scale deployment, dynamic and unstructured topology, power limitations, less memory and limited computational capabilities. Sensor nodes deployed in real-time environment's for sensing data have power-limitations which hampers the overall performance of WSNs. So, the only obvious solution is to propose an energy efficient routing protocol to optimize WSN real-time performance. Different specialists have proposed various directing conventions for WSNs dependent on Fuzzy Logic, Genetic Algorithms, Meta-Heuristics, and other improvement strategies. However, every solution suggested till date has its advantages and limitations. In this paper, our primary objective is to utilize Swarm-Intelligence based approach i.e. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), for routing protocol development. Ant colony optimization (ACO) based approach gives optimal solution in terms of efficient routing path determination, energy efficiency and delivering high performance in terms of packet delivery and throughput. In this paper, we propose a novel energy efficient ACO based multipath routing protocol for WSN i.e. IEEMARP (Improvised Energy Efficient Multipath ACO based Routing Protocol). The proposed protocol works in three phases (Neighbor Discovery via Link Knowledge, Packet Transmission via exponentially weighted moving average method and ACKR packet delivery for assuring end-to-end delivery. To validate the performance of the protocol proposed, extensive simulations were conducted using NS-2.35-allinone simulator on diverse parameters like (PDR), throughput, routing overhead, energy consumption and end-to-end delay. In addition to this, the performance of protocol is compared with traditional routing protocols like Basic ACO, DSDV and DSR and other ACO based WSN protocols like ACEAMR, AntChain, EMCBR, IACR, AntHQSeN, FACOR and ANTALG. Simulation based results, clearly states that as compared to Basic ACO, DSDV and DSR, the performance of WSN network is improvised to around 10% in all performance metrics via IEEMARP routing protocol. And as compared to ACEAMR, AntChain, EMCBR and IACR, IEEMARP performs 20% better in overall functionality and almost 10-12% better as compared to AntHQSeN, FACOR, ANTLAG routing protocols in varied WSN scenarios. It is also observed that IEEMARP protocol is highly efficient in TCP packet transmission from source to destination node.