Distributed ant colony optimization for minimum energy broadcasting in sensor networks with realistic antennas

One of the important tasks in wireless sensor networks is broadcasting, which arises when a sender node has to communicate information to all the other nodes of the network. In order to save energy, which is often a limited resource, broadcasting has to be done efficiently from an energy perspective. Energy efficiency can hereby be achieved by adjusting the transmission power levels of the sensor nodes’ antennas. This classical problem is known as the minimum energy broadcast (MEB) problem. In this work we deal with a generalization of this problem which is known as the minimum energy broadcast problem in sensor networks with realistic antennas (MEBRA). The difference to the classical MEB problem is to be found in a more realistic antenna model. In this work we propose a distributed ant colony optimization algorithm for solving the MEBRA problem. The experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm shows that it generally improves over the centralized version of a classical heuristic. Moreover, depending on the exact antenna model used, the results of the distributed ant colony optimization algorithm are very close to the results of the centralized algorithm version.