Towards Energy-Aware Ant Routing in Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

摘要: A wireless multi-hop network (WMHN) is particularly described by two properties: i) full radio networks and ii) multi-hop communication. There are several instances of WMHNs in literature like wireless mesh networks (WMNs), wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). All these types of WMHNs share the aforementioned properties and thus researchers can study them in similar ways. In this study, we address two key issues in these networks: routing and energy awareness in the routing. For this we describe ant routing algorithm (ARA), a highly adaptive, efficient, and scalable routing protocol based on ant algorithms, which are a class of swarm intelligence algorithms. Furthermore, we discuss the integration of energy awareness in ARA and describe the resulting energy-aware ant routing algorithm (EARA). The goal of EARA is to maximize the network lifetime which is generally restricted by the limited energy available to nodes.