A Review of Ant Colony Optimization Routing Protocols for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network.

Abstract

Multimedia applications have become an essential part of our daily lives, and their use is flourishing day by day. The area of wireless sensor network is not an exception where the multimedia sensors are attracting the attention of the researchers increasingly, and has shifted the focus from traditional scalar sensors to sensors equipped with multimedia devices. The multimedia sensors have the ability to capture video, image, audio as well as scalar sensor data and deliver the multimedia content through sensors network. Due to the resource constraints nature of WSN introducing multimedia will add more challenges, so the protocols designed for multimedia wireless sensor network should be aware of the resource constraints nature of WSN and multimedia transmission requirement. Ant colony optimization is a swarm intelligent algorithm that proved the efficiency to solve many complex optimization problems. Recently many routing protocols proposed based on ant colony optimization for WMSN to take advantages of ACO algorithm. In this paper we outline design challenges and requirements for designing routing protocols for WMSN, and then we review ACO routing protocols proposed for WMSN and discuss their feature and limitations. After that we will present a general comparison between them.