Ant routing protocol in a ZigBee ad hoc sensors network for radiation level monitoring

A low cost ad-hoc sensors network for the monitoring of the radiation level of contaminated and risk areas is proposed in the presented paper. An experimental system which collects and sends radiation level data from a mining area to a server was implemented. The presented approach is based on the detecting of the gamma radiation levels using ZigBee sensors which become active only when a level of radiation is exceeded and are suitable to detect and transmit data to the nearby network nodes only on demand, reducing the power consumption. To solve the routing problem in the ad-hoc network, a solution based on Ant algorithm was chosen.