EAQR: An Energy-effcient ACO Based QoS Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

Considering the features of non-uniformlydistributed traffc load and possibly existing of the traffics requiring different performance in wireless sensor networks, this paper proposes EAQR, a novel routing protocol based on an improved Ant colony optimization (ACO)algorithm. The algorithm concentrates on the provisionof QoS and balanced energy-consumption over the wholenetwork. With the introduction of some metrics like theminimum path energy and path hop count and by means ofadvancing pheromone trail model of the ant colony system,the algorithm innovatively provides two heuristic ways respectively based on the length and the comfort of path tomeet the different performance requirements of real timeand common traffcs. Simulation experiments show thatEAQR has the following advantages comparing with existing algorithm: (1) differentiates dissemination service forReal time (RT) and Best effort (BE) traffc; (2) achieveslower delay for RT traffc; (3) exhibits substantially longernetwork lifetime; (4) behaves more scalable and robust.