Ant Colony based Routing for

Wireless Sensor Network

Study Carried Out by:
Arush Sharma
Under the Guidance of:
Prof. Stephen Kim

MSECE, IUPUI
28-09-2016 1
 Outline

• Introduction
• Background
• Ant Routing Algorithm
• Drawbacks
• Improvement
• Initiation of Energy Information
• Energy Information Maintenance
• Experimental Results
• Conclusion and Future Work
• References
• Comments/Suggestions

2
 Introduction
• Sensor network consists of nodes which are used for data collection
and monitoring.
• Depending upon our applications and requirements, the topology of
network is expected to change from time to time.
• There exists no centralized control in the network.
• Nodes are resource constrained, limited transmission power, limited
energy, etc.
• As a result, the paths which were efficient initially, may become
inaccessible.
• Hence it is vital to design an algorithm which are adaptive and can
overcome the constraints.
• Swarm intelligence algorithms are adaptive to application
requirements and provide promising results.
3
 Background

• Ant Colony based routing algorithm is based on real ant’s behavior

in finding a optimal route to food nest.
• Initially, ants randomly wander around the nest searching for food.
• When the food is found, they take it back to their home leaving a
trail of hormones called pheromones.
• Other ants can sense the pheromone and prefer to follow that route
which has higher concentration of pheromone.
• As shorter paths can be traversed faster, they outweigh the less
optimal routes in terms of pheromone concentration since they
attract more ants.
• Additionally, pheromones evaporate over time, so ants less likely
follow older paths.

4
Figure 1: Working principle of Ant Colony

5
 Ant Routing Algorithm (ARA)

• ARA is a reactive routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks.

• The source node broadcasts the Forward Ant with a mission to find
the optimal path until the destination.
• At each node, the ant is either unicast or broadcast depending upon
the availability of pheromone for destination.
• If pheromone is available, then ants chooses its next hop with
Probability Pnd defined as:
(τind)β
Pnd = , β≥1
∑𝑗ε𝑁𝑖𝑑 τ𝑖𝑗𝑑 )β
(
τi
where, nd is the pheromone indicating the estimated goodness of
going from node i to destination d over neighbor n,

6
 Nid is the set of neighbors of node i over which a path to node d exists
and β is the parameter which controls the importance of pheromone.

• If no pheromone information is available, the ant is broadcast.

• When a node receives a forward ant for the first time, it creates an
entry in its routing table and forwards the ant to its neighbor.
• The routing table consists of destination address, the next hop and a
pheromone value.
• As soon as the forward ant reaches the destination, it is converted
into backward ant.
• The backward ant travels back to source retracing the path traversed
by the forward ant and updates the pheromone values.

7
• Every time when an ant passes an edge e(i,j), it increases the
corresponding pheromone concentration τi,j by a specific amount
denoted by Δτ as follows:
τi,j = τi,j + Δτ

• Like their natural counterpart, artificial pheromones decay over

time. The evaporation process provides a negative feedback in the
system which is defined as follows:
τi,j = (1-ρ).τi,j , ρϵ (0, 1]

8
 Drawbacks

• The Ant Routing Algorithm considers the pheromone value in its

probabilistic routing process.
• This approach favors shortest paths over non shortest paths.
• As a result the nodes located on the shortest path will be used more
compared to the nodes on non-optimal paths.
• Their residual energy will decrease over a period of time.
• Thus the optimal path is no more efficient as holes (voids) are
introduced in the path.

9
 Improvement

• The aforementioned drawbacks can be overcome by introducing

certain factors.
• The Energy-aware Ant Routing Algorithm is a modified version of
ARA where the routing process is adapted to maximize the network
lifetime
• This algorithm considers not only the pheromone values, but also
the residual energy of a node.
• Since the residual energy of a node changes over time, this
algorithm initiates route discovery phase when the residual energy
drops below the threshold.

10
 Initiation of Energy Information
• In the route discovery phase it extracts the energy information of the
nodes along with the pheromone values.
• The ant agents are expanded by two additional fields
• The first one accumulates the normalized residual energy values of
all intermediate nodes of the ants path.
• The second field stores the lowest residual energy value an ant agent
encounters on its path, denoted as έmin.
• The formula given below depicts the calculation of the initial energy
value έinit.
έ𝑎𝑣𝑔−έ𝑚𝑖𝑛
έinit = έavg - , b ϵ R≥1
𝑏

11
• This way the algorithm computes the έinit and stores in its routing
table. The resulting routing table consists of tuple having destination
address, the next hop, the pheromone value and the energy for that
path.

12
 Energy Information Maintenance
• The Energy Aware Routing Algorithm has to update the energy
values in the routing table of each node.
• Similar to Forward/Backward ants, it uses periodic energy ant
agents (PEANTs) for updating the energy values in the nodes.
• This ant reads the current energy information and reinitializes the
energy values.
• Though PEANTs are small control packets, flooding these ants
through the network can be a costly operation in terms of energy.
• Hence it is vital to send the PEANTs occasionally, when the energy
state of the network has fallen below the threshold level.

13
• Energy Aware Routing Algorithm considers both artificial
pheromone and estimated energy value in its forwarding decision.
• The modified transmission probability is given as :
τ𝑖𝑑 𝑗 α[έ𝑖𝑑 𝑗 ]β
Pid,j = , ,
∑𝑘ε𝑁𝑖 τ𝑖𝑑 𝑘 α[έ𝑖𝑑 𝑘 ]β
, ,

where the exponents α and β are the weight constants. This probability
is a tradeoff between pheromone intensity and the energy intensity.

14
 Experimental Results
• The author compared the results of EARA with traditional ARA.
• Following parameters were considered during the experiment:
a) Total number of mobile nodes: 50
b) Simulation area: 1500 x 300 meter2.
c) Model: Random Waypoint Mobility Model
d) Maximal velocity of node: 5 m/s
e) Data rate: 25 KB/s
f) Simulation time: 900 seconds
g) Pause time: 150 seconds

15
Figure 2: Packet Delivery Rate for ARA & EARA

16
Figure 3: Routing Overhead of ARA & EARA

17
Figure 4: Energy Dead Series of ARA & EARA

18
 Conclusion and Future Work
• EARA outperforms ARA in terms of network lifetime by 30
seconds.
• On the other hand, ARA is ahead of EARA in terms of routing
overhead and packet delivery.
• The performance of both the algorithms can be improved by
adjusting the values of weight parameters, α and β.
• However it’s a difficult task to find viable parameters for algorithm.
• Most of the ACO algorithm uses constant pheromone decay. Hence
there is an ample research direction to use the dynamic pheromone
decay.

19
 References
• Michale Frey, Friedrich Grobe, Mesut Gunes. Energy-Aware ant
routing in wireless multi-hop networks, 2015.
• Xiaodung Liu, Songyang Li, Miao Wang. An Ant Colony based
routing algorithm for wireless sensor network, International Journal
of Future Generation Communication and Networking, 2016.
• J Muhtadi, M. Orgun, K Saleem, Analysis of the Scalability and
Stability of an ACO based routing protocol for Wireless Sensor
Network, 12th International Conference on Information Technology,
2015.
• Vishwas C.G.M, M. Kiran, A taxonomy on Ant Colony based
routing algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE, 2015.
• T. Camilo, C. Carreto, J. Silva, F. Boavida. An Energy-Efficient ant-
based routing algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks, 2006

20
Comments/Suggestions?

Thank you.

21