EEMCA: An Energy Efficient Multi-hop Routing in Cluster-based Wireless Sensor Networks using Ant Colony Optimization

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is created based on a collaborative effort of a large number of nodes. One of the most important components of the sensor nodes is the power unit. It has low limited power and is usually renewable. To decreasing the consumption power of sensors and toincrease the scalability of a network, one can use unequal clustering mechanism. Toconfront the clustering overhead, in this paper we introduce Energy Efficient Multihop routing for Cluster-based wireless sensor networks using Ant Colony Optimization (EEMCA) protocol that prevents reclustering of sensor nodes and decides on the cluster heads based on the measuring of power of sensors in clusters. In EEMCA protocol, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)method is used for creating energy efficient multihop routes from cluster heads to sink. EEMCA is compared to two protocols; ACALEACHand EEUC. Simulation results show that EEMCA protocol outperforms the other two protocols with an increase in network lifetime.