ROUTING OPTIMIZATION FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS USING FUZZY LOGIC-ANT COLONY

Abstract

It is essential to find and maintain routes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) because of energy restrictions as they run on battery. Also WSNs are prone to sudden changes for example due to node failure or unpredictable topological changes. For us to reduce energy consumption in WSNs the design of routing technique is very key. The purpose of this research work is to design a routing technique that will reduce the level of energy consumption and increase the network performance by considering three key parameters namely the distance between source node and the gateway, the energy of the sensor node and the amount of data in the queue for the sensor node. In WSNs the nodes which are near the sink or the gateway are used to forward or direct the data for the nodes which are far away from the sink. This means that the nodes closer to the sink will get drained faster in terms of power because they have to send the data of the nodes which are far away from the sink node together with their own data. In order to avoid nodes from failing there is need to design a routing protocol that is aware of the energy of the sensor nodes, the data in the queue and the distance to the sink node. The sink node is the one that sets up the routes for each sensor node. The routing protocol used is based on Fuzzy Logic and Ant Colony Optimization (FACO). The use of Fuzzy Logic (FL) is to compute the overall cost of each node to the gateway by considering the data load in the node and the energy of the node. The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is used in this work to find and evaluate the shortest route from the source sensor node to the gateway (sink node) which is determined by the shortest distance. The designed protocol showed an improved performance and a routing balance between the network performance and the network xi lifetime. The number of packets delivered increased by 18.25 %, the number of dead nodes decreased by 40 % meaning more nodes were available for data transmission and the energy level increased by 100% for FACO as compared to ACO routing protocol. This protocol can be used for communication in WSNs especially for industry based applications.