Ant Colony Optimization Approaches in Wireless Sensor Network: Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been widely implemented in large sectors such as military, habitat, business, industrial, health and environment. WSN is part of a distributed system where elements such as routing, load balancing, energy efficiency, node localization, time synchronization, data aggregation and security need to be addressed to improve its efficiency, robustness, extendibility, applicability and reliability. Despite multiple approaches proposed to improve all these aspects, there is still room for improvement in order to enhance the capability of WSN in terms of routing and energy efficiency. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is one of the approaches used to extend WSN capabilities because its heuristic nature is very suitable with distributed and dynamic environments. This study covers the common WSN aspects and performance evaluation criteria in addition to the list of previous studies that have used ACO approaches in WSN.