Quantum-Inspired Ant-Based Energy Balanced Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Background: Limited energy capacity of battery operated Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the prime impediment in the ubiquity of WSNs as the network lifetime depends on the available energy at the nodes. Prolonging the network lifetime is the principal issue in WSNs and the challenge lies in devising a strategy for judicious use of available energy resources. Routing has been one of the most commonly used strategies for minimizing and balancing the energy consumption of nodes in a WSN. Methods: Routing in large networks has been proved to be NP-Hard and therefore meta heuristic techniques have been applied for handling this problem. Quantum-inspired algorithms are relatively new meta heuristic techniques which have been shown performing better than their traditional counter- parts. Therefore, Quantum inspired ant Based Energy balanced Routing (QBER) algorithm has been proposed in this paper for addressing the problem of energy balanced routing in WSNs. Results: Simulation results confirm that the proposed QBER algorithm performs comparatively better than other quantum inspired routing algorithms for WSNs. Conclusion: In this paper, a Quantum Inspired Ant-based routing (QBER) algorithm has been proposed for solving the problem of energy balanced routing in wireless sensor networks.