Minimum energy broadcasting in wireless sensor networks: An ant colony optimization approach for a realistic antenna model

The classical minimum energy broadcast (MEB) problem in wireless adhoc networks, which is well-studied in the scientific literature, considers an antenna model that allows the adjustment of the transmission power to any desired real value from zero up to the maximum transmission power. However, when specifically considering sensor networks, a look at the currently available hardware shows that this antenna model is not very realistic. A first contribution of this work is therefore the re-formulation of the MEB problem for an antenna model that is realistic for sensor networks. In this antenna model transmission power levels are chosen from a finite set of possible ones. The second contribution concerns the adaptation of ant colony optimization, a current state-of-the-art algorithm for the classical MEB problem, to the more realistic problem version. The obtained results show that the advantage of ant colony optimization over classical heuristics even grows when the number of possible transmission power levels decreases. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.