Fault-Tolerant Ant Colony Based-Routing in Many-to-Many IoT Sensor Networks

Wireless IoT Sensor Networks have a wide range of applications in many areas of modern life, including environmental monitoring where data is sent to a sink. In such networks, it is likely for node failures to occur during the course of normal operation, e.g., when nodes run out of battery power or they have crashed due to defective hardware. Increasingly sophisticated applications, such as fire sprinkler systems, however deploy multiple sources and multiple sinks, in what is called many-many IoT networks. For these critical applications, it is necessary to develop a fault-tolerant routing protocol that is able to route messages around failed nodes, without a significant overhead. Focusing on many-many IoT networks, we present a novel distributed fault-tolerant routing protocol for wireless IoT sensor networks based on ant colony optimisation, that is able to route from multiple sources to multiple sinks. Our results show that our protocol is able to achieve more than 80% delivery ratio with 5% node failures. Our approach is scalable, compared to several approaches that require periodic topology maintenance to work.