Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are usually troubled with constrained energy and complicated network topology which can be mitigated by introducing a mobile agent node. Due to the numerous nodes present especially in large scale networks, it is time-consuming for the collector to traverse all nodes, and significant latency exists within the network. Therefore, the moving path of the collector should be well scheduled to achieve a shorter length for efficient data gathering. Much attention has been paid to mobile agent moving trajectory panning, but the result has limitations in terms of energy consumption and network latency. In this paper, we adopt a hybrid method called HM-ACOPSO which combines ant colony optimization (ACO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) to schedule an efficient moving path for the mobile agent. In HM-ACOPSO, the sensor field is divided into clusters, and the mobile agent traverses the cluster heads (CHs) in a sequence ordered by ACO. The anchor node of each CHs is selected in the range of communication by the mobile agent using PSO based on the traverse sequence. The communication range adjusts dynamically, and the anchor nodes merge in a duplicated covering area for further performance improvement. Numerous simulation results prove that the presented method outperforms some similar works in terms of energy consumption and data gathering efficiency.
Keywords: ant colony optimization; mobile agent; moving trajectory; particle swarm optimization; wireless sensor network.