Swarm Intelligence-Based Bio-Inspired Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks
Authors: Rahim Naseer Abdul , Neelima Vontela , Narsimha Gugulothu 
Published: September 2020

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining immense popularity as a result of their wide potential applications in industry, military, and academia such as military surveillance, agricultural monitoring, industrial automation, and smart homes. Currently, WSN has garnered tremendous significance as it is has become the core component of the Internet of Things (IOT) area. Modern-day applications need a high level of security and quick response mechanism to deal with the emerging data trends where the response is measured in terms of latency, throughput, and scalability. Further, critical security issues need to be considered due to various types of threats and attacks WSNs are exposed to as they are deployed in harsh and hostile environments unattended in most of the mission critical applications. The fact that a complex sensor network consisting of simple computing units has similarities with specific animal communities, whose members are often very simple but produce together more sophisticated and capable entities. Thus, from an algorithmic viewpoint, bio-inspired framework such as swarm intelligence technology may provide valuable alternative to solve the large scale optimization problems that occur in wireless sensor networks. Self-organization, on the other hand, can be useful for distributed control and management tasks. In this chapter, swarm intelligence and social insects-based approaches developed to deal with a bio-inspired networking framework are presented. The proposed approaches are designed to tackle the challenges and issues in the WSN field such as large scale networking, dynamic nature, resource constraints, and the need for infrastructure-less and autonomous operation having the capabilities of self-organization and survivability. This chapter covers three phases of the research work carried out toward building a framework. First phase involves development of SIBER-XLP model, Swarm Intelligence Based Efficient Routing protocol for WSN with Improved Pheromone Update Model, and Optimal Forwarder Selection Function which chooses an optimal path from source to the sink to forward the packets with the sole objective to improve the network lifetime by balancing the energy among the nodes in the network and at the same time selecting good quality links along the path to guarantee that node energy is not wasted due to frequent retransmissions. The second phase of the work develops a SIBER-DELTA model, which represents Swarm Intelligence Based Efficient Routing protocol for WSN taking into account Distance, Energy, Link Quality, and Trust Awareness. WSNs are prone to behavior related attacks due to the misbehavior of nodes in forwarding the packets. Hence, trust aware routing is important not only to protect the information but also to protect network performance from degradation and protect network resources from undue consumption. Finally, third phase of the work involves the development of SIBER-DELTAKE hybrid model, an improved ACO-KM-ECC trust aware routing protocol based on ant colony optimization technique using K-Medoids (KM) algorithm for the formation of clusters with Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC). KM yields efficiency in setting up a cluster head and ECC mechanism enables secure routing with key generation and management. This model takes into account various critical parameters like distance, energy, link quality, and trust awareness to discover efficient routing.