In this paper, a family of ant colony algorithms called DAACA for data aggregation has been presented which contains three phases: the initialization, packet transmission and operations on pheromones. After initialization, each node estimates the remaining energy and the amount of pheromones to compute the probabilities used for dynamically selecting the next hop. After certain rounds of transmissions, the pheromones adjustment is performed periodically, which combines the advantages of both global and local pheromones adjustment for evaporating or depositing pheromones. Four different pheromones adjustment strategies are designed to achieve the global optimal network lifetime, namely Basic-DAACA, ES-DAACA, MM-DAACA and ACS-DAACA. Compared with some other data aggregation algorithms, DAACA shows higher superiority on average degree of nodes, energy efficiency, prolonging the network lifetime, computation complexity and success ratio of one hop transmission. At last we analyze the characteristic of DAACA in the aspects of robustness, fault tolerance and scalability.
Data aggregation is important in energy constraint wireless sensor networks which exploits correlated sensing data and aggregates at the intermediate nodes to reduce the number of messages exchanged network. This paper considers the problem of constructing data aggregation tree in a wireless sensor network for a group of source nodes to send sensory data to a single sink node. The ant colony system provides a natural and intrinsic way of exploring search space in determining data aggregation. Moreover, we propose an ant colony algorithm for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks. Every ant will explore all possible paths from the source node to the sink node. The data aggregation tree is constructed by the accumulated pheromone. Simulations have shown that our algorithm can reduce significant energy costs. Wireless sensor network localization is an important area that attracted significant research interest. This interest is expected to grow further with the proliferation of wireless sensor network applications. This paper provides an overview of the measurement techniques in sensor network localization and the one-hop localization algorithms based on these measurements. A detailed investigation on multi-hop connectivity-based and distance-based localization algorithms are presented. A list of open research problems in the area of distance-based sensor network localization is provided with discussion on possible approaches to them.