EARP: An Enhanced ACO-Based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks with Multiple Mobile Sinks

A plenty of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)-based routing algorithms have been proposed to find optimal path of mobile sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, they concentrate on energy efficiency and ignore fault tolerance for critical data collection points like Cluster Heads (CHs). They supposed an ideal scenario where there are no failures which is not the case in reality due to failures resulting from unattended and hostile deployment environments and so on. Moreover, the existing routing protocols are not application-specific enabled (i.e., the parameters cannot be adapted to the application's requirements). In this paper, we propose an energetically-optimized multi-sink-based clustered WSN model along with a fault-tolerant and energy-efficient Enhanced ACO based Routing Protocol (EARP) to provide reliable data transmission in case of encountering a faulty path. Unlike existing studies, EARP addresses jointly the different constraints of forest fires detection application like fault tolerance, network lifetime and response time. The proposed EARP is simulated along with its counterparts in a general scenario based on various main metrics and also in an application-specific scenario (forest fires detection) based on network lifetime and response time. The simulations results prove its superiority, compared to its peers, in both scenarios.