Termite-hill: Performance optimized swarm intelligence based routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a large collection of sensor nodes with limited power supply, constrained memory capacity, processing capability, and available bandwidth. The main problem in event gathering in wireless sensor networks is the formation of energy-holes or hot spots near the sink. Due to the restricted communication range and high network density, events forwarding in sensor networks is very challenging, and require multi-hop data forwarding. Improving network lifetime and network reliability are the main factors to consider in the research associated with WSN. In static wireless sensor networks, sensors nodes close to the sink node run out of energy much faster than nodes in other parts of the monitored area. The nodes near the sink are more likely to use up their energy because they have to forward all the traffic generated by the nodes farther away to the sink. The uneven energy consumption results in network partitioning and limit the network lifetime. To this end, we propose an on-demand and multipath routing algorithm that utilizes the behavior of real termites on hill building termed Termite-hill which support sink mobility. The main objective of our proposed algorithm is to efficiently relay all the traffic destined for the sink, and also balance the network energy. The performance of our proposed algorithm was tested on static, dynamic and mobile sink scenarios with varying speed, and compared with other state-of-the-art routing algorithms in WSN. The results of our extensive experiments on Routing Modeling Application Simulation Environment (RMASE) demonstrated that our proposed routing algorithm was able to balance the network traffic load, and prolong the network lifetime.