Computational Intelligence, Volume 0, Number 0, 2014

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING IN WIRELESS

SENSOR NETWORKS
SAEED MEHRJOO ,1 ABDOLHOSSEIN SARRAFZADEH,2 AND MEHRDAD MEHRJOO3
1

Department of Computer Engineering, Dariun Branch, Islamic Azad University, Dariun, Iran
2
Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
3
Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

This article proposes a novel algorithm to improve the lifetime of a wireless sensor network. This algorithm
employs swarm intelligence algorithms in conjunction with compressive sensing theory to build up the routing
trees and to decrease the communication rate. The main contribution of this article is to extend swarm intelligence
algorithms to build a routing tree in such a way that it can be utilized to maximize efficiency, thereby rectifying
the delay problem of compressive sensing theory and improving the network lifetime. In addition, our approach
offers accurate data recovery from small amounts of compressed data. Simulation results show that our approach
can effectively extend the network lifetime of a large-scale wireless sensor network.

Received 16 November 2012; Revised 23 December 2013; Accepted 27 February 2014

Key words: wireless sensor network, lifetime, compressive sensing theory, particle swarm optimization,
artificial bee colony.

1. INTRODUCTION
A wireless sensor network (WSN) refers to a network with a large number of sensing nodes that are relatively inexpensive and have limited energy, which have information
collection and processing and transmitting of sensed data as their basic function. WSN is
employed widely and expected to form a new generation of networks. Some potential applications of such networks could be monitoring a specific region, specially places that are
hardly accessible such as battlefields (Alsharabi et al. 2008) and volcanoes (Wen-Zhan et
al. 2010), detecting fire events in forests (Junguo et al. 2009), and measuring temperature
and humidity in specific places (Lee et al. 2008). A problem of WSN is the energy limitation of nodes, and it is complicated and expensive to charge or replace their batteries. The
main reason behind the energy depletion of nodes is their communications (Soua and Minet
2011). Therefore, minimizing the data transmission is an effective approach to improve the
networks lifetime.
This article addresses networks that measure the temporal spatial field of physical
quantities. This requires transmitting all the sensed data. This kind of network obtains
the maximum amounts of data because all the sensors should send their data without any
aggregation, which causes more energy consumption. The reason is that each node should
transmit the messages of all its children in addition to its own. We can find the solution to
having an exact estimation of the whole data by only transmitting the required information.
This scheme improves the energy consumption of the nodes and the overall network; hence,
the lifetime of the network is increased. This idea can be realized using the compressive
sensing (CS) theory (Baraniuk 2007; Candes and Wakin 2008).
CS is a new theory by which a signal can be recovered efficiently with just a few samples. The only constraint is that the signal can be represented in the form of a sparse on a
proper basis. Under certain conditions, CS allows the reconstruction of all sensor readings
Address correspondence to Saeed Mehrjoo, Department of Computer Engineering, Dariun Branch, Islamic Azad
University, Dariun, Iran; e-mail: sa.mehrjoo@yahoo.com
2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

using much fewer transmissions than aggregation schemes. Therefore, we apply CS theory
on WSN to reduce the transmission rate, and to apply the theory more efficiently, we have
developed routing trees using swarm intelligence (SI) algorithms. The main contribution of
this article is extending SI to build a better routing tree for CS.
SI (Blum and Li 2008) is inspired by the collective behavior of social insects and other
animal societies. Two well-known SI-based algorithms are particle swarm optimization
(PSO) and artificial bee colony (ABC). PSO is the more famous optimization algorithm;
however, currently, ABC is also widely used (Sundar and Singh 2012; Pulikanti and Singh
2009; Sundar et al. 2010), and its valuable properties such as simplicity, flexibility, robustness, and just common control parameters such as colony size and maximum cycle number
make it popular. In some applications, ABC outperforms PSO (Karaboga, Akay, and Ozturk
2007; Sabat, Udgata, and Abraham 2010; Karaboga and Basturk 2007).
Particle swarm optimization was developed by Kennedy and Ebert (1995) based
on the collective behavior of birds and fishes. ABC was introduced by Karaboga and
Basturk (2007) based on the cooperative behavior of bees. Both of these algorithms have
been developed to address optimization problems, and we have taken their advantage to
build up the optimized routing tree in applying the CS theory more efficiently and in
improving the WSNs lifetime. In fact, our routing problem is a multi-objective optimization problem, and thus, we use PSO and ABC as two well-known multi-objective solving
algorithms because of their performance, and meanwhile, we decide to compare PSO with
ABC in our routing protocol to choose the best one.
This article is organized as follows. In Section 2, related literature is briefly examined.
Section 3 introduces SI and two algorithms based upon it. In Section 4, CS theory and its
application in WSN will be introduced, and this section also shows the details of building
the optimized routing tree and the overall steps of data gathering in WSN. Section 5 focuses
on simulation results and comparison. The final section brings the conclusion.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
There are many routing protocols based on SI algorithms such as ant colony optimization, PSO, ABC, and genetic algorithm. Camilo et al. (2006) presented a new WSN routing
protocol, which was based on the ant colony optimization metaheuristic. Their protocol minimized communication load and maximized energy savings. Karaboga, Okdem, and Ozturk
(2012) developed a novel energy-efficient clustering mechanism based on ABC algorithm,
presented to prolong the network lifetime. ABC was successfully used in clustering techniques, and they showed that an ABC-based clustering algorithm can successfully be applied
to WSN routing protocols. Apetroaei et al. (2011) proposed a spanning tree topology for
the WSN that dynamically changed according to the nodes residual energy, to maximize
the usage of the network. The main processing was carried out using genetic algorithm;
their contribution related to the protocol design consisting in the way the spanning tree was
built, based on the randomly selected edges. The fitness function was used in the genetic
algorithm and the recalculation of the topology according to the energy levels. However,
in-network compression has not been considered in the research outlined previously.
There is an increasing attention toward the problem of gathering data while jointly performing compression. In recent times, new methods for distributed sensing and compression
have been advanced based on CS theory (e.g., Candes and Tao 2006; Candes, Romberg, and
Tao 2006; Baraniuk 2007). In Bajwa et al. (2007), CS is used in a distributed communication scheme for energy-efficient estimation of sensed data in a WSN. Rabbat et al. (2006)
proposed a scheme involving CS to monitor the network. Their goal was to correctly identify a small set of nodes that fail, through the transmission of random projections (i.e., linear

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING

combinations), indicating the status of the nodes. Shen et al. (2008) addressed the problem of gathering data in distributed WSNs through tree data-gathering multi-hop routing,
and they used wavelet transformation for data compression. They introduced CS as one of
the possible methods for data compression but did not investigate the impact of the routing scheme on the compression process and lifetime. A method to distributed coding and
compression in sensor networks based on CS was presented by Duarte et al. (2006). The
authors advocated the necessity to exploit the data both temporally and spatially. Luo et al.
(2010) proposed an algorithm to maximize the throughput of WSN by the use of CS theory without considering the network lifetime and the delay of data gathering. Chun, Rana,
and Wen (2009) and Luo et al. (2009) focused on projection matrix to increase the lifetime
of the WSN. Quer et al. (2009) addressed the joint routing and compression problem by
exploiting the spatial correlation among sensor readings, and their goal was to reconstruct
the original signal with good accuracy from a small subset of nodes. They focused on signal
representation and their aim was just reconstruction of error and they ignored the lifetime.
Lee et al. (2009) proposed energy-efficient compressed sensing for WSNs using spatially
localized sparse projections, and to keep the transmission cost for each measurement low,
they obtained measurements from clusters of adjacent nodes.
The main difference between this work and previous research is in employing SI to construct a routing tree so that CS theory can be applied more efficiently. The proposed method
will increase the network lifetime and recover the original vector of data with negligible
error. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first one that employs SI algorithms
to build up such routing trees.
3. SWARM INTELLIGENCE
This section introduces SI, and the two SI-based algorithms, PSO and ABC, which are
used in this article, are described.
3.1. Swarm Intelligence
SI (Blum and Li 2008) is inspired by the collective behavior of social insects such as
ants, bees, and wasps, as well as by other animal societies such as flocks of birds or schools
of fish, and is concerned with the design of intelligent multi-agent systems. Researchers
have been fascinated by colonies of social insects for many years, and the mechanisms
that govern their behavior remained unknown for a long time. Colonies are able to achieve
complex tasks in cooperation, even though the single members of these colonies are nonsophisticated individuals. Relatively simple actions or interactions between the colonies
individual members make coordinated colony behavior.
SI methods have been very successful in the area of optimization, and this part introduces SI algorithms as optimization methods. Optimization problems are of high importance
both for the industrial world and for the scientific world. In some problems known as NPhard problems, finding the exact solution to the problem is very sophisticated or impossible;
therefore, finding a near-optimal solution is ideal. Multi-objective problems are the problems with several objective functions, all of which should be optimized. SI-based methods,
such as PSO or ABC, can find near-optimal solutions to the NP-hard problems; meanwhile,
they are also appropriate for finding the best solutions to the multi-objective problems.
3.2. Particle Swarm Optimization
PSO was developed by Kennedy and Ebert (1995) based on the collective behavior of
birds and fishes. PSO is based on this scenario: imagine a group of birds searching for food.

COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Each bird can be informed about its best previous position and the best previous position
of all other birds. In PSO, each solution (particle) behaves like a bird. Each particle also
has a velocity, which shows the direction of its flight, and a fitness that shows how good
that particle is. This fitness is calculated by a function. PSO initializes the population with
randomly generated solutions. A potential solution can be achieved as the particles update
their position and velocity based on equations (1) and (2):




Vi.t C1/ D w  Vi.t / C c1 rand1./ Pi  Xi.t/ C c2 rand2./ Pg  Xi.t /
(1)
Xi.t C1/ D Xi.t / C Vi.t C1/

(2)

where Xi.t / and Vi.t / are the position and velocity of particle i in the t t h iteration, Pi is the
best previous position of particle i, and Pg is the best previous position for the particles that
have been found so far. The w in the preceding equation is the inertia factor that controls
the trade-off between the local and global position directions. rand1() and rand2() are two
random numbers in the interval 0; 1. The last two factors, c1 and c2 , are scaling constants
and are usually taken as c1 D c2 D 2:0 (Engelbrecht 2007).
The swarm in PSO is initialized by assigning each particle to a uniformly and randomly chosen position in the search space. Velocities are initialized randomly in the range
Vmin ; Vmax .
The pseudo-code of the procedure is shown in Figure 1.
PSO can be utilized in both scientific research and engineering applications. There is no
overlapping and mutation calculation in PSO. The search can be carried out by the speed of
the particle. During the development of several generations, only the most optimal particle
can transmit information onto the other particles. Because the PSO involves very simple
calculations, the speed of the search is very high. Compared with other methods, it has the
ability to produce stronger optimizations and is less complex. PSO adopts the real number
code, and it is decided directly by the solution.
3.3. Artificial Bee Colony
As stated previously, Karaboga and Basturk (2007) first introduced the ABC in 2005.
In this algorithm, there are three groups of bees. The first group is referred to as employed
bees, and they look around to find a better food source. The second group consists of the

FIGURE 1. Pseudo-code of the procedure.

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING

onlooker bees who analyze the information they receive from the employed bees about the
location and quality of potential food sources. Finally, the last group includes scout bees,
whose duty is to find new food sources (random sources). We can summarize the algorithm
as follows.
Step 1 (initialization): half of the population is assigned to the solution space. Bees are randomly generated and their fitness value is calculated. Employed bees make up this portion
of the population.
Step 2 (move the onlookers): based on equation (3), the possibility of any food source being
chosen by the onlookers is calculated, and the onlookers are moved to their new positions
using equation (4).
F .i /
Pi D Ps
(3)
kD1 F .k /
where i is the position of the i t h employed bee, F ./ is the fitness function, S is the number
of the employed bees, and Pi is the possibility of the i t h employed bee being chosen.
xij .t C 1/ D ij C .ij .t /  kj .t //:

(4)

In equation (4), Xi represents the position of the i t h onlooker bee, t is the number of iterations, k is the randomly chosen employed bee, j represents the dimension of the problem,
and ./ generates a series of random variables within the range 1; 1.
Step 3 (moving the scouts): if the fitness value of the employed bees does not improve after
a certain number of iterations, known as the limit, the respective food sources are ignored,
and the employed bees are changed into scout bees to seek new food sources based on
equation (5).
ij D ij min C r  .ij max  ij min /
(5)
where r is a random number in the range 0; 1.
Step 4 (updating the best position): the best found food source of this step is compared
with the best previously found food source; if the former is better, it will replace the latter.
Step 5 (termination checking): if the termination constraint of the algorithm (the number
of iterations or a certain fitness value) is satisfied, the algorithm is finished; otherwise, it
repeats the steps beginning from step 2.
Simple concept, easy implementation, high robustness, fast convergence, high flexibility, and fewer control parameters are some of the advantages of the ABC. Multidimensional
and multimodal optimization problems can be easily solved by ABC. This and the
previously listed advantages of ABC have made it a very popular SI-based algorithm.
4. COMPRESSIVE SENSING IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
This section introduces the main concepts of the CS theory in brief and provides the
practical method of applying it to WSN.
4.1. Compressive Sensing Theory
CS is a new theory in the field of signal processing. According to this theory, any signal
S of length N , which is a K-sparse signal can be effectively represented with just K dimensions instead of N dimensions. A signal is said to be a K-sparse signal if at most K << N
of the signal basis coefficient in the original or transformed space are nonzero. Therefore,

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FIGURE 2. Simple-way routing tree on a network with N D 20 nodes and a base station.

some special signals can be recovered with only M D O.KlgN / instead of N coefficients.
Mathematical representation of the mentioned theory is as follows: y D S , where is
a matrix of size MN and an i.d.d. matrix y is a vector of length M , which is capable of
holding the entire information contained in vector S and can be recovered with the least
error using various algorithms such as orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) (Gilbert 2007)
or basis pursuit (BP) (Chen and Saunders 1998). The recovering process is mainly based on
equation (6):
min kS kl1

S 2R

subject to

y D 'S

(6)

P
in which kS k l1D i jSi j; further details on CS theory can be seen in the works of Baraniuk
(2007) and Candes and Wakin (2008).
We can benefit from the application of CS in WSN because of its distinct features. CS
processing and communications are combined into one distributed operation, and there is
almost no in-network processing and communication.
4.2. Applying Compressive Sensing Theory to Wireless Sensor Network
This article mainly addresses networks that are supposed to measure the temporal
spatial field of physical quantities. For instance, consider a network that is set to measure
humidity variations in a specific region at a specified time. This situation requires that all the
sensor nodes send their sensed data to the base station, either individually or through other
network nodes. This kind of network obtains the most amount of data about the desired
variable. Consequently, the energy consumption is high, because each node should transmit
the messages of all its children nodes in addition to its own message. This results in a vast
increase in the number of messages. If we suppose that such a network consists of N sensor
nodes, therefore, the base station should receive the sensed data of allN nodes. In case we
represent the data of node i with di , we will have a vector as d1 ; d2 ; : : : ; dN  in the base
station.
In the simplest case and disregarding CS, we can build a routing tree in which leaf
nodes transmit their data to their parents in a packet and each parent will in turn transmit P
arriving packets plus to its own packet to its respective parent using P C 1 packets. Finally,
N packets will be collected at the base station. Figure 2 shows an example of data gathering
by use of this method, which we call simple way.
Obviously, such a method will decrease the lifetime of the network dramatically, because
the total number of messages is immense and of O.N 2 /. Also, the nodes that are in the

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING

FIGURE 3. Applying compressive sensing to a wireless sensor network.

near vicinity of the base station will have to transmit a vast number of messages, and thus,
they will have to endure a great load. These nodes are the bottlenecks of the network, while
nodes that are farther away from the base station will transmit very few messages.
Now we apply the CS theory to the WSN. The major principle is that the base station
receives M packets of information instead of N packets of data, and by employing CS
theory, an exact estimation of the N data is derived. To do this, all nodes will produce M
random numbers and multiply them by the sensed data, .1i di ; 2i di ; : : : ; M i di /; thus, a
vector of length M is made. Then the node waits to receive their childrens vectors and adds
them with its own vector. Finally, the resulting vector is transmitted to the respective parent
node by the use of M packets. Figure 3 illustrates this method.
Consequently, all the nodes will have to transmit only M packets, and finally, we will
have a vector of length M in the base station. The elements of this vector have a general
P
form of N
j D1 ij dj , where ij and dj are the random number and sensed data of node j ,
respectively. Based on CS theory, it is possible to derive an exact estimation of the N data.
The mathematical representation of the problem is as follows:
Y D :D
0

1
0
y1
'11 '12
B y2 C
B '21 '22
C
B
Y DB
@ ::: A D @ :::
yM
'M1 'M 2

1
   '1N
   '2N C
C
::
A
:
   'MN

(7)
0d
1
B d2
DDB
@ :::

1
C
C:
A

dN

In equation (7), the i t h column of the matrix of coefficients, , represents the random
numbers generated by node i. The base station requires to recover N data packets from
M packets. If the base station knows the algorithm employed by each node in generating
random numbers along with their seeds, the same set of numbers can be generated at the
base station, and thus, there is no need to transmit the matrix .
Based on the CS theory, all the nodes will transmit only M packets, while M << N .
Therefore, the number of packets in this method is of O.MN /, and all the nodes throughout
the network will be burdened with an equal load, eliminating bottlenecks in the network. We
name this method as the CS-based way. Figure 4 shows an example of CS-based-way data
gathering.
We can develop an even more efficient method by combining the two mentioned
methods. The idea is that nodes that transmit less than M data packets use the first method,
and just those nodes with more than M data packets use the second method. In this way,
any node that is going to use the second method for the first time should multiply each
data packetwhich is actually the data received from the children nodesby M different
random numbers. Therefore, the node should generate a vector with M elements for each

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FIGURE 4. Compressive-sensing-based-way routing tree on a network with N D 20 nodes and a base station.

FIGURE 5. Hybrid-way routing tree on a network with N D 20 nodes and a base station.

packet of received data, then add all the vectors to its respective vector, and finally transmit
the resulting vector to its parent using M data packets. From then on, all the aforementioned
nodes use the second method. We will refer to this as the hybrid-way method. This method
is illustrated by an example in Figure 5.
The basic question is the value of M , which has a very important role in determining
the network lifetime. The less the value of M , the more the lifetime of the network, but
the amount of error in estimating the data by the base station will also increase. As M
increases, the amount of data estimation error decreases, but the network will have a shorter
lifetime. The appropriate value of M depends on several factors including the correlation of
the sensed data, the density of the nodes, and the geographical location of the sensor nodes.
We employed the scheme proposed in [26] to choose an optimum value for M . This method
uses a constant parameter named compression ratio, expressed by equation (8), to obtain M .
Cr D

N
M

(8)

where N is the number of network nodes and Cr is the compression ratio, which is a constant
determined by the statistical information derived from previous sensed data. Thus, we can
obtain M from equation (7). It is important to consider that N  Nmin and Nmin is highly
dependent on the sensed data and the previous statistical information of the network data.
The efficiency of the hybrid-way method greatly depends on the routing tree. Consider
the tree represented in Figure 6; here, the root of the tree is one of the nodes and sends as

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING

FIGURE 6. A network with N D 500, Cr D 5, and a routing tree with a node as root.

FIGURE 7. A network with N D 500, Cr D 5, and a routing tree with base station as root.

many as M D N=Cr .N D 500; Cr D 5; and M D 100/ packets to the base station, and
as N is a large number, M will be a large number too. This will result in excessive packet
transmission and will present a bottleneck for the network. However, in case the base station
is considered as the root of the tree, as in the example in Figure 7, each sub-tree will have to
transmit M 0 D N 0 =Cr packets, where N is the number of the sub-trees nodes .N 0  Nmin /.
Obviously, M 0 is much lower than M , and finally, we will have the same M data packets at
the base station.
This method will remove the network bottlenecks and will significantly decrease the
number of messages. Therefore, we have to partition the network and implement CS on
each of them separately. Spotting these benefits, we improve the hybrid way by partitioning.
Although network partitioning is an NP-hard problem, such as building the best routing tree,
we will introduce a suboptimal method to conquer these two problems in the next section.

5. ROUTING TREE
This section describes a method, based on SI, used to build appropriate routing trees
that can be utilized to maximize the efficiency of CS theory. The final part explains the main
steps of data gathering in the network.

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5.1. Routing Tree Based on Swarm Intelligence

Consider a network with N nodes named S1 ; S2 ; : : : ; SN and a base station BS. Each
node has a unique ID from 1 to N , and the ID of base station is 0.
An array of length N of IDs is used to represent the routing tree in both PSO and ABC
algorithms. In PSO, the structure of the tree that is actually the solution of the problem is
called particle, and in ABC, this structure is called bee. The indices of the array start from
1 and end in N . If the i t h cell has the value p, then the parent of node i is node p, and if
it is equal to 0, the parent of the node is the base station. Figure 8 shows an example of a
routing tree, along with its representation structure.
The population of the algorithm includes a number of particles (bees) that are initially
built randomly and updated later on; thus, it is important to ensure that the particles are
actual trees. In cases where they are not trees, we have to change them into trees using the
pseudo-code shown in Figure 9.
For example, in Figure 8, if the index number 19 equals 8 after being updated, it will no
longer be a tree, and it would be necessary to use the repair function to change it into a tree.
The fitness function is one of the most important elements of PSO and ABC algorithms.
This article categorizes the parameters of the fitness functions into three groups. The first
one maximizes the effectiveness of the CS theory. The second one increases the lifetime of
the network without considering the CS theory. The third one corresponds to reduced delay
due to the application of CS theory. Next, the parameters are introduced.

FIGURE 8. The representation structure of a routing tree on a network with N D 20.

FIGURE 9. Pseudo-code of repair function.

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Parameter 1 (number of messages): This parameter represents the total number of messages transmitted by the network nodes. Obviously, the less the number of messages in a
specific routing tree, the better the tree. The number of messages is shown by NM.
Parameter 2 (transmission energy): This parameter indicates the amount of energy consumed by the network nodes to transmit packets. Evidently, a small transmission energy
means that the solution is a good one. Transmission energy is shown by TE and is in the
first group.
Parameter 3 (root energy): The base station is basically far from the sensor nodes; therefore, the root of the tree will consume the most amount of energy to transmit the packets
compared with other network nodes. Hence, a tree with a more root energy is a better tree.
In the fitness function, the root energy is shown by RE, and it is considered as a parameter
of the second group.
Parameter 4 (root distance): The less the distance between the root of the routing tree and
the base station, the better the tree. RD, which falls in the second group, represents the root
distance in the fitness function.
Parameter 5 (energy-to-load ratio): The load of a node represents the energy consumed
to transmit and receive packets in a routing tree, while the energy of a node represents the
remaining energy of the node. A higher energy-to-load ratio means a better state of the node.
In the fitness function, two parameters named MEL and SEL are used. MEL represents the
energy-to-load ratio for the weakest node, and SEL represents the sum of ratio of the energy
to load of all network nodes.
Parameter 6 (delay): One of the disadvantages of routing trees is the delay that they produce
in data gathering. This fact is illustrated in Figure 10. Node x has received all the data of its
children except one of them, and it waits to receive the last data. In such trees, a long delay
will occur, and the reason is the difference in the depth of the children of the nodes. The
more similar the children depths, the less delay will occur. Therefore, the delay parameter,
which is the sum of depth differences between all the child of nodes, falls in the third group,
and the less this parameter is, the better the routing tree.
Parameter 7 (tree depth): Each node should wait for all its children to transmit their data
and then transmit its data; therefore, the less the depth of the tree is, the faster the tree root
receives the messages, and such a tree is very efficient in data gathering. This parameter is
referred to as TD.
Fitness function uses all the explained parameters to evaluate the goodness of each tree.
However, it is important to note that the influence of the parameters on the quality of the
tree is different. Therefore, a series of coefficients are employed to determine the influence
of any parameter on the fitness value. The final form of the fitness function is as follows:

FIGURE 10. An example of delay caused by comprehensive sensing.

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1
1

CW2
C W 3 .RE/
F D W1
NM
TE


1
C W 4
C W 5 MEL C w6 SEL
RD




1
1


CW7
CW8
delay
D


(9)

where coefficients are updated as equation (10) based on Hussain and Islam (2009),
Wc D

Wp C jf c  fpj
1 C e fp

(10)

Wp and Wc are the previous and current coefficients, respectively, and fp and fc are the
fitness values of the previous and current best particles or bees. The initial value of the coefficients is adjusted using the technique described by Tan and Krpeoglu (2003). This fitness
function is an NP-hard multi-objective optimization problem, and finding the accurate solution is impossible in a polynomial time; thus, finding the near-optimal solution is ideal. As
we mentioned before, PSO and ABC are two SI-based algorithms that are appropriate for
this kind of problems.
In the mentioned structure for the routing tree, which is an array of length N , a 0 value in
any cell means that the node with the same index number is the root of a sub-tree. Therefore,
the number of zeros in the array represents the number of partitions, and it is determined by
the mentioned parameters, especially the number of messages. The constraint N 0  Nmin is
checked by the fitness function, and in case it is not satisfied, the fitness value of that tree is
set as zero.
5.2. General Steps of Data Gathering
The methodology for gathering data on the network is divided into three phases:
(1) Configuration phase
(2) Routing phase
(3) Recovery phase
(1) Configuration phase: In this phase, the base station finds the best hybrid-way routing
tree using the PSO (or ABC) algorithm and calculates the number of times that the tree
should be used to configure the WSN as follows:
Ti D

fitness
 T0
average fitness

(11)

where T0 is a constant number, average fitness is the average of the fitness value of
previous trees, and Ti is the number of times that i t h tree would be used. Equation (11)
shows that the more the fitness of a tree improves, the more that tree would be used
for configuring, but if the fitness value is small, the respective tree will be used less
frequently. Also, as we approach the end of the lifetime of the network, the number of
times that a specific tree is used is reduced to avoid the death of nodes due to overusing
the configuration (e.g., the root node).
In this step also, the base station decides which of the methods, i.e., the simple
way or the CS-based way, should be used by each of the nodes. Then, a number of

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING

FIGURE 11. Control packet.

messages containing all the details of the configuration are sent to all the nodes. Afterward, the nodes will know their parents and the method they have to use to transmit
the data.
We consider the energy consumed in transmitting data packets and control packets
in the simulations. As Figure 11 shows, the base station broadcasts the schedule packet
in which the first byte contains the frequency of the respective routing tree, the second
and third segments are also 1 byte long and represent the node ID and parent ID of that
node, respectively, and at the end of control packet, one bit shows the mode of CS in
which the existence of 0 means that node should use the simple way and 1 means it
should use the CS-based way.
(2) Routing phase: In this phase, nodes transmit the sensed and received data from their
children to the base station using either method, which is decided by the base station. In
addition, at the last round of each schedule, nodes append their residual energy level to
their data packets. Then, the base station uses the current energy resources to generate
the next routing tree.
(3) Data recovery phase: In this phase, the base station receives a vector of length M and
reconstructs the original vector by solving the l1-norm minimization problem, as mentioned earlier by use of any reconstruction method. For example, the base station can use
OMP as a recovery algorithm, or BP, to solve the l1-norm minimization problem using
a linear programming technique. In our scheme, the base station uses BP because it
needs fewer measurements and offers higher reconstruction precision than OMP, under
the same measurement.
6. SIMULATION RESULTS
To determine the effectiveness of our method, a simulation study has been conducted. A
Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the simulator is similar to Data-Gathering Medium
Access Control (DMAC) (Guangyan, Xiaowei, and Jing 2006). The node positions of the
WSN have been selected randomly. The network is assumed to be ideal, i.e., there is no
message loss, conflict in the network, and so on. The network is said to be alive, while
all the nodes are alive. For each experiment, sensors are placed randomly in the field, and
the average of 20 different experiments is used for performance evaluation. The rest of the
parameters of the network are shown in Table 1.
The radio model considered for transmitting the data is the same as the model presented
by Feeney (2001), and we used Rakhmatov and Vrudhula (2003) to implement the quasireal battery depletion model in our simulator. The radio model parameters and values of
the parameters employed in PSO and ABC algorithms are shown in Table 2 and Table 3,
respectively.
The temperature values from the field environment are used as the sampled data because
of their robust temporal and spatial correlations. Another assumption is that the sampled
data are sparse in discrete Fourier transformation. If S  is the vector reconstructed in the
base station and S is the true vector of nodes values, the reconstruction error is defined as

COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
TABLE 1. Simulated Network Parameters.

Parameter

Value

Number of nodes
Network size
Base station
Initial energy of nodes
Min energy of nodes
Data transfer rate

500
50  50 m2
(100, 25)m
2J
0.0001 J
Bandwidth D 1 Mbps

TABLE 2. Radio Model Parameters.

Parameter

Value
10 pJ/bit/m2
0.0013 pJ/bit/m4
50 nJ/bit
5 nJ/bit
4000 bit

"s
"l
Ee
EBF
L

TABLE 3. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Artificial Bee

Colony (ABC) Parameters.

Parameter

PSO value

ABC value

Population size
Number of generations
C1
C2
Vmax
Vmin
Limit

20
30
2.0
2.0
4.0
4.0

20
30

20

"D

kvec.S /  vec.S  /k2

:
kvec.S /k2

(12)

In Figure 12, we show the reconstruction error as a function of the number of measurements among different sparsity levels, for N D 500. As illustrated in Figure 12, in
regard to various sparsity levels of the original data .K D 10; 30; 60/, when the number of
measurements, M , gradually increases, the relative reconstruction errors decrease.
However, as we mentioned previously, the lifetime of WSN is strongly dependent on M .
Figure 13 is the simulation results of 30 trials for different M and its effect on the lifetime
of WSN. It demonstrates that the less the value of M , the more the lifetime of the network,
but the amount of error in estimating the data by the base station will also increase.
According to the results, it is possible to recover the original data with high probability
for K D 30 and M D 75, and it causes a reconstruction error of less than 0.1; therefore, we
assume Cr to be 6.7 .Cr D N=M D 500=75 D 6:7/.

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING

FIGURE 12. Reconstruction error versus number of measurements; comparison among different sparsity
levels.

FIGURE 13. Lifetime of a wireless sensor network versus the number of messages.

We considered the dynamic minimal spanning tree routing protocol (DMSTRP)

(Guangyan et al. 2006) to compare with ours. For all of the protocols, we considered three
modes, simple way, CS-based way, and hybrid way. Figure 14 shows the results of the simulation of the presented algorithms along with DMSTRP in the simple-way, CS-based-way,
and hybrid-way modes. In this figure, the lifetime of the network (based on the number of
data gathering, which we call round) for different algorithms is shown. Clearly, the lifetime
of the network is significantly increased through the hybrid-way method, and among the
hybrid-way methods, our protocols have the most effect in the lifetime of the WSN. Also,
it can be seen that a simple application of the CS, CS-based way, will have little effect in
improving the network lifetime; it even increases the number of messages.
Figure 15 shows the average of the transmitted messages in each round. As can be seen,
it admits the significant decrease in the number of transmitted messages due to applying the
hybrid-way algorithm. By this way, we can observe that the CS-based method is even worse
than the simple way in average amount of messages.
To simulate delay of data gathering, we assume that node-to-node transmission delay is
; all nodes have the sensed date ready at the beginning of data-gathering round and transmit
them simultaneously; each parent node can receive the data of only one of its children at a

COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

FIGURE 14. Lifetime of wireless sensor network versus the number of nodes; comparison among different
protocols and different modes.

specific time, and nodes can transmit and receive concurrently. Figure 16 illustrates the delay
of data gathering based on  for non-CS-based-DMSTRP (NCSP) algorithm, CS-basedDMSTRP (CSP) algorithm, partial hybrid method (hybrid method without parameter 6
delayand parameter 7tree depthin its fitness function), and complete hybrid method.
It shows that NCSP has the least delay, and this is just because it does not use CS, but
among the three other methods, the complete hybrid method has the least delay owing to
using parameters 6 and 7.

SWARM INTELLIGENT COMPRESSIVE ROUTING

FIGURE 15. Average number of messages per round.

FIGURE 16. Delay of data gathering.

7. CONCLUSION
This article has introduced the application of CS theory in WSN and an algorithm based
on PSO or ABC to build a routing tree in such a way that CS theory can be applied more
efficiently. This algorithm has increased the network lifetime and recovered the original vector of data with the least error. It also has decreased the delay in data gathering. Simulation
results have shown that simply applying the CS theory would have a little effect on the lifetime of the network and the hybrid AI method is an appropriate method to apply CS theory
in WSNs.
More investigation can be on distributed compressive sensing in WSN and applying it
with distributed swarm intelligent algorithm such as ant colony optimization.

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