Energy-Efficient Ant Colony Based LEACH Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network consist of multiple sensor nodes which sense and transmit data to a base station for data collection. Since the nodes in WSN are battery powered devices and nodes loss energy mostly due to transmission, an energy efficient routing protocol is needed to reduce the nodes energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime. However, existing routing protocols produce some drawbacks such as selection of cluster head with low residual energy and formation of different sizes of cluster which leads to uneven energy consumption among the nodes. Therefore, an Ant Colony Optimization based Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH-ACO) protocol for energy efficient transmission in WSN is proposed in this paper. This research aims to develop a routing protocol that utilize the existing LEACH routing protocol to improve the performance of WSN and prolong the lifetime of the network. The results showed that LEACH-ACO protocol outperformed Direct Transmission (DT) and LEACH protocol in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption and energy per transmission.