Quality of service (QoS) and energy awareness are key requirements for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which entail considerable challenges due to constraints in network resources, such as energy, memory capacity, computation capability, and maximum data rate. Guaranteeing QoS becomes more and more challenging as the complexity of WSNs increases. This chapter firstly discusses challenges and existing solutions for providing QoS and energy awareness in WSNs. Then, a novel bio-inspired QoS and energy-aware routing algorithm is presented. Based on an ant colony optimization idea, it meets QoS requirements in an energy-aware fashion and, at the same time, balances the node energy utilization to maximize the network lifetime. Extensive simulation results under a variety of scenarios demonstrate the superior performance of the presented algorithm in terms of packet delivery rate, overhead, load balance, and delay, in comparison to a conventional directed diffusion routing algorithm.
LKHW: a directed diffusion-based secure multicast scheme for wireless sensor networks