Abstract: To reduce the energy consumption and sink mobile distance of mobile sink wireless sensor networks simultaneously, a path planning algorithm for mobile sink based on enhanced ant colony optimization algorithm in wireless sensor networks is proposed. Genetic operators are introduced to ant colony optimization algorithm in order to prevent ant colony optimization premature. The non-uniform of data distribution is considered as the constraint condition, the network lifetime and sink mobile distance are considered as a multi-objective problem, and the enhanced ant colony optimization is adopted to search the Pareto sub-optimal sets of rendezvous points. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduces the network average energy consumption effectively and improves the energy consumption balance.

Key words: wireless sensor network, path planning, genetic algorithm, artificial ant colony optimization, directed graph spanning tree, network lifetime