WOAD3QN-RP: An intelligent routing protocol in wireless sensor networks — A swarm intelligence and deep reinforcement learning based approach

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a crucial part of the Internet of Things (IoT), and research on WSN routing protocols has always been a hot topic in academia. However, traditional WSN routing protocols have limited utilization of available information during the routing decision process, leading to challenges such as insufficient adaptability to network topology changes, high communication delays, and short network lifetimes. To address these issues, this paper proposes an innovative intelligent routing algorithm WOAD3QN-RP, which cleverly integrates swarm intelligence algorithms and deep reinforcement learning. The WOAD3QN-RP not only effectively reduces delay but also balances energy consumption and flexibly adapts to changes in network topology, while simultaneously determining the optimal multi-hop path, effectively extending the lifetime of the network. Firstly, the WOAD3QN-RP algorithm employs the Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) to determine the optimal cluster heads (CHs). In the process of selecting CHs, the algorithm comprehensively considers key factors such as the residual energy of nodes, node distance, and communication delay, thereby significantly improving the accuracy and efficiency of CH selection, which contributes to better energy distribution and performance of the network. Secondly, in terms of multi-hop path selection, WOAD3QN-RP uses a dueling double deep Q-network (D3QN) to determine the optimal multi-hop path. Through utilizing neural networks to interact with the environment, intelligent agents are trained to learn routing policies to adapt to dynamic changes in the network topology and ensure the balance between energy consumption and multi-hop routing performance. Experimental results show that WOAD3QN-RP exhibits significant advantages over existing routing protocols in terms of network lifetime, energy efficiency, and communication delay.