Data dissemination based on ant swarms for wireless sensor networks

There are many difficult challenges ahead in the design of an energy-efficient communication stack for wireless sensor networks. Due to the severe nodes' constraints, protocols have to be simple yet scalable. To this end, collective social insects behavior could be adopted to guide the design of these protocols. We exploit the simple behaviors of ant swarms in foraging and brood sorting to design a hierarchical and scalable data dissemination strategy. In order to allow a realistic evaluation, a comprehensive simulator involving critical components of the communication stack is incorporated. The proposed scheme promotes a uniform distribution of clusterheads, which subsequently enables substantial energy savings over other clustering algorithms.