Ant-based delay-bounded and power-efficient data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a novel delay-bounded and power-efficient routing for in-network data aggregation, called DPIDA, which aims to ensure a compromise between the energy consumed during the collection of data sensed by a set of source sensor nodes and their timely delivery to the sink node. Design/methodology/approach Based on the ant-colony-optimization metaheuristic, the proposal establishes a routing structure that maximizes the number of overlapping routes and minimizes the total transmission power while ensuring delay-bounded paths and a symmetric transmission power assignment to reliably deliver the sensed data. Findings The proposal was extensively compared to two other known protocols regarding different keys factors. Simulation results, including topology snapshots, show the ability of DPIDA to ensure the energy-latency tradeoff. They also show the superiority of DPIDA compared to the two considered protocols. Originality/value This paper presents a novel ant-based protocol that uses in-network data aggregation and transmission power-adjustment techniques to conserve the energy of nodes while ensuring delay-bounded paths and a reliable deliverance of data which is ensured by providing a symmetric transmission power assignment.