An Energy Efficient Mesh LNN Routing Protocol Based on Ant Colony optimization

Low-power and Lossy network (LNN) is commonly deployed in Internet of Things applications. It consists of a considerable amount of devices, also known as motes, with sensory capacity and wireless connectivity deployed in a wide geographical area. Such devices face limitations in terms of energy, memory and processing. A common topology in LNN is a mesh-like one. The communication between nodes often happens in a multi-hop fashion due to their limited transmission range. There is a need of efficient routing protocols, in terms of energy consumption. The present paper depicts a routing algorithm based on ant colony optimization. It also shows details about its implementation in the Contiki OS network system and analysis of its performance in comparison with the default Contiki’s mesh routing protocol. Results shown that the proposed algorithm had a better performance in terms of packet delivery rate, duty cycling and energy consumption.