Designing a Low Power MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network in NS2

In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have attracted the researchers due to its wide applications. The advancements in WSN have enabled a wide range of environmental monitoring and object tracking system.WSN consists of small low cost sensor nodes and their transmission range, storage capabilities and energy resources are limited. This paper examines Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) based routing in which we have taken energy efficiency as the main criteria for performing routing and deriving optimized path for data forwarding and processing to the base node. A sensor network is deployed over a region and the main task of such a network is to gather information from the node and transmit it to the base station for further processing. Therefore if the transmission range is long, then the energy dissipated will be more and if the range is short then energy will be saved. The PSO generates a path of routing by taking energy as fitness value to judge different path and to choose the best optimized path which consumes less energy as compared to other routing paths. The simulations are carried out in ns2 and are compared with the results of Genetic Algorithm (GA) showing that the results of PSO are better than the GA. [4]