We address the problem of energy efficiency and reliability for forest fires monitored by a distributed bandwidth-constrained Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). To improve energy efficiency, data routing is an important approach that is being considered in the context of WSNs. An attractive and widely used method to find the optimal communication paths is the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. However, the traditional ACO-based routing protocols only consider the energy-efficiency while ignoring the overall network reliability (before and after failures) which is critical in the context of WSNs. In addition, the existing protocols are not application-specific (i.e., the parameters cannot be adapted to the application’s requirements). In this paper, we propose a novel Energy-efficient and Reliable ACO-based Routing Protocol (E-RARP) for WSNs. The proposed protocol not only guarantees high quality communication paths in terms of energy efficiency but also ensures the communication reliability. Critical events in delay-intolerant applications (e.g., forest fires detection) require reliable transmission in order to perform reliable decisions and take appropriate actions in a timely fashion. The simulations results reveal that E-RARP outperforms respectively Load Balanced Cluster-based Routing using ACO and Enhanced Ant-based QoS-aware routing protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks protocols with a significant improvement of 30.55 % in network lifetime and 14.71 % in network response time.
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