Software defined networking (SDN) provides the advantages of decoupling the control and the forwarding planes and the packets are classified into flows and the routing decision are based on the flow. Since the SDN conducts the flow-based routing strategy and ant colony optimization (ACO) routing protocols have the potential to work in a flow-based manner. Previous research of ant-based routing algorithms mainly focused on energy efficiency. However, how ant-based routing algorithms perform in other metrics has been neglected. In this research, we compare the packet delivery ratio, the end-to-end delay and the first packet arrival time of an ant colony optimization (ACO) routing algorithm with three routing protocols, namely, AODV, DSDV, and DSR, in the wireless sensor networks with different density traffic. We found that the ACO is not only energy efficient but also has the best performance in both the packet delivery ratio and the first packet arrival time compared to other routing algorithms with low density traffic. In some low density traffic cases, it might not perform well in the end-to-end delay. The ACO does not perform well in both the packet delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay with high density traffic, so ACO is more suitable to be used in low density traffic.