A QoS-aware routing algorithm based on ant-cluster in wireless multimedia sensor networks

QoS-aware routing algorithm is important in wireless multimedia sensor networks. This paper formulates a generalized QoS-aware routing model on the basis of multiple routing metrics and priorities of packets. We first introduce a 2D plain-based routing algorithm IPACR which improves the standard ant colony algorithm by optimizing the initial distribution of artificial pheromone in order to accelerate the algorithm convergence rate. Then a clustering-based routing algorithm ICACR is presented which can be well applied in a large scale network. ICACR is a variation of IPACR because it can be suitable for clustering cases to satisfy the larger scale situations. Both the numerical algorithm performance analysis and simulation of IPACR and ICACR are given. The results show that ICACR outperforms IPACR in terms of both network lifetime and QoS-aware routing metrics in large scale wireless multimedia sensor networks. Moreover, the simulation based on the real video traces shows that by extending the multi-path to ICACR for different priorities of video frames better performance can be achieved.