Affiliation:
1. Botswana International University of Science and Technology, Botswana
Abstract
Social insect communities are formed from simple, autonomous, and cooperative organisms that are interdependent for their survival. These communities are able to effectively coordinate themselves to achieve global objectives despite a lack of centralized planning, and the behaviour is referred to as swarm intelligence. This chapter presents a study of communication protocols for wireless sensor networks utilizing nature-inspired systems: social insect-based communities and natural creatures. Three types of insects are used for discussion: ants, termites, and bees. In addition, a study of the social foraging behavior of spider monkeys is presented. The performances of these swarm-intelligence-based algorithms were tested on common routing scenarios. The results were compared with other routing algorithms with varying network density and showed that swarm-intelligence-based routing techniques improved on network energy consumption with a control over best-effort service. The results were strengthened with a model of termite-hill routing algorithm for WSN.