QIH: An Efficient Q-Learning Inspired Hole-Bypassing Routing Protocol for WSNs

This paper addresses the
local minimum phenomenon
, routing path enlargement, and load imbalance problems of geographic routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with holes. These issues may degrade the network lifetime of WSNs since they cause a long detour path and a traffic concentration around the hole boundary. Aiming to solve these problems, in this work, we propose a novel geographic routing protocol for WSNs, namely, Q-learning Inspired Hole bypassing (QIH), which is lightweight and efficient. QIH’s conceptual idea is to leverage Q-learning to estimate the distance from a node to the holes. QIH makes routing decisions following the nodes’ residual energy, their estimated distance to the holes, and their distance to the destination. We first confirm the effectiveness of QIH by theoretical analysis. Then, we conduct extensive simulations of QIH in comparison to state-of-the-art protocols. The simulation results show that QIH outperforms the other protocols in terms of network lifetime, packet latency, and energy consumption.