Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN): A Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks have several issues and challenges with regard to Energy Efficiency, Limited Computational capability, Routing Overhead, Packet Delivery and many more. Designing Energy Efficient Routing Protocol has always been a limiting factor cum issue for Wireless Sensor Networks. Varied routing protocols being proposed till date for overcoming these issues based on Swarm Intelligence. Swarm Intelligence is concerned with study of combined behavior of systems designed by varied components for coordinating among themselves via decentralized controls and self-organization. Algorithms based on Swarm Intelligence, nature based intelligence are highly robust, adaptive and scalable. This paper presents comprehensive survey of Ant Colony Optimization based routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks to give better platform for researchers to work on various shortcomings of protocols developed till date to develop efficient routing protocol for WSN in near future.