ACOMAR: ACO-based MAC-aware routing protocol

In this work, we present a new nature-inspired cross-layer routing protocol named ACO-based MAC-aware routing protocol (ACOMAR). An enhancement of time division multiple access (TDMA) algorithm is proposed where slots allocation algorithm considers the geographical distance between nodes and the sink. The nodes that are far away from the sink have better chance to be scheduled first. This strategy will result in more efficiency than a usual random TDMA schedule. This algorithm uses a metric based on the pheromone's value of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to choose the best next hop with the aim of reducing latency and energy and extending the network lifetime. Comparisons are made between ACOMAR, MAC-aware routing (MAR) and the latest cross-layer protocol latency and energy MAC-aware routing (LEMAR). The experimental results show that ACOMAR outperforms considerably LEMAR by 80%, 20%, 81%, and 54% in latency, energy, hop count, and throughput, respectively. Consequently, ACOMAR is a suitable solution for healthcare applications where WSN-based critical IoT devices interact quickly in emergence cases (high rate in latency optimization 80%).