Performance Evaluation of Ant Colony Optimization for Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network is composed of a large number of sensor nodes and a sink. In the wireless sensor networks the main problem is limited battery life used by sensor nodes and the mobility of the sink nodes in the network. To avoid this problem, protocols with mobile sinks were proposed. They helped in achieving load balancing and uniform energy consumption throughout the network. This research aimed to concentrate on the dynamic requirements of the mobile sink by providing an overview of mobile sink protocol concerns and performance comparison between Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. The routing protocols are implemented using NS-2.34. The simulation compares the routing protocols with using transmission control protocol (TCP) and user datagram protocol (UDP) with different performance metrics. The performance of these routing protocols analyzed using five metrics: throughput, end to end delay, packet delivery ratio, energy consumption and network lifetime. Simulation results of 80 nodes showed that the ACO has high throughput with 0.8% than LEACH under TCP traffic. Average end to end delays record the value of 0.007 ms in ACO under UDP traffic (best record was 0.005 ms with 20 nodes). PDR was 92.20% in ACO than LEACH with 51.20% under UDP traffic. ACO recorded lowest energy consumption with 5.50% and 9.62% for LEACH under TCP traffic.