SIBER-XLP: Swarm Intelligence Based Efficient Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Improved Pheromone Update Model and Optimal Forwarder Selection Function

This paper presents swarm intelligence based Efficient Routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks termed as SIBER-XLP which takes into account link quality of the path along with energy, distance to select the best quality path from source to sink for packet forwarding. This work proposes improved Pheromone Update Model and optimal Forwarder Selection Function to select the best next neighbor to forward the packet to the sink node with the sole objective of improving the Network Lifetime by balancing the energy among the nodes in the network to ensure that some nodes along the path do not get depleted fast (resulting in Network disconnections or partitioning) and at the same time selecting good quality links along the path to guarantee that node energy is not wasted due to too frequent retransmissions. The performance evaluation of our proposed approach SIBER-XLP was conducted using NS-2 Simulator considering both Static and Dynamic Scenarios with varying network sizes. Our simulation results indicate that SIBER-XLP performs extremely well in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio, Energy Efficiency and latency.