A Simple Pheromone Based On-Demand Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A simplified design for an on demand routing protocol using pheromone (attractiveness) gradients for data forwarding decisions is proposed. The developed Pheromone-based Routing Strategy (PRS) provides an easy concept for a data-centric routing protocol in wireless sensor networks. The protocol has a flat hierarchy, works on-demand, is source-initiated and has its origin in the idea of ant-based routing. During development of PRS, the important variable pheromone was turned into a special factor for link costs and is the sole determinant for data load propagation where the pheromone level of the sensor node defines its attractiveness for forwarding data. The link costs called pheromone are calculated from the sensor nodes’ energy status, as well as the received signal strength and the current buffer (sensor on board memory) fill level. PRS only supports node-to-sink data traffic and therefore is a lightweight approach to generalized multihop routing algorithms in WSNs. The PRS routing protocol is implemented on a MSP430F149 low power microcontroller using a CC2420 wireless interface which are acting together as a sensor node. For performance evaluation of PRS a multi-agent based simulation environment called NetLogo is used.