Pheromone-Oriented Routing Protocol for Load Balancing of Wireless Sensor Networks with Multiple Sinks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have attracted significant interests of many researchers because they have great potential as a means of obtaining information of various environments remotely. WSN have their wide range of applications, such as natural environmental monitoring and environmental control in office buildings. In WSN, many sensor nodes with such resource limitation as battery capacity, memory, and CPU are deployed in a region and used to monitor and gather information of environments. Therefore, scalable and efficient network control is needed to prolong the lifetime of WSN. Ant-based Routing algorithms (AR) have attracted attentions as routing algorithms for saving energy consumption because they are more robust, scalable and efficient than other conventional routing algorithms. This paper proposes an AR-inspired novel routing protocol for the long-term operation of WSN, named the Pheromone-Oriented Routing Protocol (PORP). By using PORP, the load of each sensor node is autonomously balanced. We evaluate PORP using computer simulations and discuss its development potential. In simulation experiment, PORP is compared with past AR to verify its effectiveness.