Energy-Efficient Ant Colony-Based k-Hop Clustering and Transmission Range Assignment Protocol for Connectivity Construction in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

Connectivity construction is the main phase of a communication-oriented topology control process. It consists of improving the current network physical topology while preserving important properties such as connectivity and symmetry. In this paper, we address the problem of combining two of the techniques commonly used for this purpose in networks composed of a large number of energy constrained wireless sensor-nodes namely, clustering and power control. We propose an ant colony-based asynchronous and localized protocol that helps to significantly reduce energy losses by simultaneously eliminating redundant and poor quality links, always keeping the Cluster Head-to-member distance up to k-hops (k≥1) and minimizing signalization. Simulation results show that our protocol outperforms some state-of-the-art solutions in terms of Quality of the Topology (QoT) and network lifetime prolongation.