Enhancing the reliability on data delivery and energy efficiency by combining swarm intelligence and community detection in large-scale WSNs

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to address the duality between the cost-effective energy efficiency and the reliable data delivery is a relevant issue. This paper presents a novel bio-inspired routing protocol, named CB-RACO, that combines the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic with the computationally cheap and distributed community detection technique Label Propagation (LP). CB-RACO creates communities in the WSNs and meets the balance of energy consumption by routing data inside-communities through swarm intelligence. As a consequence, CB-RACO demands low memory and overhead in construction and maintenance of routing paths. Additionally, CB-RACO achieves high data delivery reliability through a data retransmission strategy based on acknowledgments between communities. We simulated CB-RACO in large-scale scenarios according to the goodput, delivery delay and energy consumption metrics. The results have shown that the proposed approach may provide significant improvement in comparison to ant-based strategies that do not rely on community structures.