Abstract
Energy is an extremely crucial resource for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Many routing techniques have been proposed for finding the minimum energy routing paths with a view to extend the network lifetime. However, this might lead to unbalanced distribution of energy among sensor nodes resulting in, energy hole problem. Therefore, designing energy-balanced routing technique is a challenge area of research in WSN. Moreover, dynamic and harsh environments pose great challenges in the reliability of WSN. To achieve reliable wireless communication within WSN, it is essential to have reliable routing protocol. Furthermore, due to the limited memory resources of sensor nodes, full utilization of such resources with less buffer overflow remains as a one of main consideration when designing a routing protocol for WSN. Consequently, this paper proposes a routing scheme that uses SWARM intelligence to achieve both minimum energy consumption and balanced energy consumption among sensor nodes for WSN lifetime extension. In addition, data reliability is considered in our model where, the sensed data can reach the sink node in a more reliable way. Finally, buffer space is considered to reduce the packet loss and energy consumption due to the retransmission of the same packets. Through simulation, the performance of proposed algorithm is compared with the previous work such as EBRP, ACO, TADR, SEB, and CLR-Routing.