Routing protocol based ant colony optimization system for hybrid sensor and vehicular networks

This paper investigates the proposition of a novel reliable routing protocol for Hybrid Sensor and Vehicular Networks. In this solution, we apply the concept of ant colony optimization meta-heuristic to route alert messages from a source node (a sensor node that detects any emerged event along a road) to the sink. In our proposed approach, the sink is responsible for predicting the best route that leads to itself. Thus, once a sensor node detects any event, the packets will be conducted to the sink following a predefined optimal path already calculated by the sink. This mechanism allows the timely delivery of alert messages from the source node to the sink and incites sensor nodes to preserve their energy by minimizing their involvement in relay tasks. The simulation results show that our solution has the capability of finding an optimal and faster solution using fewer sensor nodes and possesses strong robustness.