ON THE SUITABILITY OF USING ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION FOR ROUTING MULTIMEDIA CONTENT OVER WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

This paper studies the suitability of using a meta-heuristic ant colony technique in routing multimediacontent over wireless sensor networks. The presented technique is both energy and QoS-aware. Ant colonyalgorithm is used to find the optimal routing path. Optimality is in the sense of minimizing energyconsumption and increasing link quality and reliability. The proposed approach results in minimizingenergy consumption and prolonging the lifetime of the network. Moreover, the optimal path has a high linkquality and reliability which enhances video frame quality and ensures high probability of successfuldelivery of video frames. The importance given to energy consumption, link quality, and link reliabilitymetrics can be varied depending on the multimedia application requirements.