Swarm inspired routing protocol for enhanced link quality and life span of mobile wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A Mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) is made up of sensor nodes that have the ability to roam within the network. A node is a small device which has three basic components: a sensing subsystem for information collection from the physical environment, a processing subsystem for local data processing and storage and wireless communication subsystem for data transmission. Introducing mobility to the traditional wireless sensor network is more advantageous, and the movement of nodes can be attained with mobilizers in a sensor node for varying their locations or springs/wheels can help a sensor to self-propel or they can be attached to transporters like vehicles, animals, robots etc. Occasionally the sensor nodes get carried away due to the environment (ocean or air) in which they are placed. Nowadays researches prove that mobile wireless sensor network outperform the static sensor network because of the following advantages: a sparse architecture, dynamic topology, re-organisation of a network, reduction of energy holes, increased life time, reduced energy consumption, increased throughput, data fidelity. The applications of the MWSNs can be broadly distributed into timedriven, event-driven, on-demand and tracking based applications. Routing is defined as movement of a data packet from source to destination. The path of each message destined to the base station in a sensor network is crucial in terms of network life time. Routing of a data through long routes can increase the network delay whereas sending the information by the shortest route can always cause the intermediate nodes to die, because of depleted energy leading to network partitioning newline