Analyzing ant colony optimization based routing protocol against the hole problem for enhancing user's connectivity experience

This paper investigates the ant colony optimization (ACO) based routing protocol against holes (or voids) to address user's connectivity via Pervasive Wireless Sensor Networks (PWSNs). A hole is an area that has no active sensors, which makes a connection between one side of the network and the other side impossible. To avoid such holes, prior works detected them only when packets reached nodes near the hole, called dead-ends. In this case, the packets need to be rerouted, which results in additional communication cost. The ant colony optimization (ACO) approach is known to be suitable for dynamic environments, which makes it a good choice to deal with the hole problem. We study the capability of an ACO-based routing protocol, called the biologically inspired secure autonomous routing protocol (BIOSARP), for resolving this issue. Because of its routing criteria, BIOSARP does not try to detect the holes after their appearance, but rather avoids them. Network simulator 2 (ns-2) is utilized to perform an analysis by adopting a flag-based feedback mechanism in BIOSARP and is further compared with on-demand routing with the void avoidance (ODVA) protocol in terms of the delivery ratio and energy consumption. Findings clearly demonstrate that BIOSARP can efficiently maintain the network prior to any possible hole problems, by switching data forwarding to the most optimal neighboring node. Thus, it can self-adapt to faults appearing in PWSN and efficiently maintains the network communication.