Performance evaluation of ant based routing protocol for WSNs with Heterogeneous nodes under different radio propagation models

The ever-increasing demand for multimedia surveillance and monitoring has led to the deployment of wireless sensor networks capable of capturing multimedia contents along with the scalar data. However, most of the routing protocols designed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are meant only for homogeneous sensor networks in which all sensor nodes have same capabilities in terms of communication, computation, energy supply, etc. This paper presents an ant-based QoS routing protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks consisting of scalar and multimedia sensor nodes with diverse QoS requirements. The proposed protocol proposes different path selection criteria for control traffic and data traffic. The data traffic is further categorized into multimedia traffic and scalar traffic and QoS routes are selected according to the traffic type, thus improving network performance. Further, prior to actual deployment of such networks, an extensive evaluation of the protocols is carried out by making use of simulators. A simulator must replicate realistic conditions and one of the most difficult aspects is the radio signal propagation model. This paper shows that the non-determinism present in some radio propagation models induce randomness which may compromise the performance of many protocols and demonstrates the effectiveness of proposed protocol over AODV under different propagation models.