A Swarm Intelligent Algorithm Based Route Maintaining Protocol for Mobile Sink Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent studies have shown that mobile sink can be a solution to solve the problem that energy consumption of sensor nodes is not balanced in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Caused by the sink mobility, the paths between the sensor nodes and the sink change frequently and have profound influence on the lifetime of WSN. It is necessary to design a protocol that can find efficient routings between the mobile sink and nodes but does not consume too many network resources. In this paper, we propose a swarm intelligent algorithm based route maintaining protocol to resolve this issue. The protocol utilizes the concentric ring mechanism to guide the route researching direction and adopts the optimal routing selection to maintain the data delivery route in mobile sink WSN. Using the immune based artificial bee colony (IABC) algorithm to optimize the forwarding path, the routing maintaining protocol could find an alternative routing path quickly and efficiently when the coordinate of sink is changed in WSN. The results of our extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed route maintaining protocol is able to balance the network traffic load and prolong the network lifetime.