Hindawi Publishing Corporation Te Scientifc World Journal Volume 2013, Article ID 437926, 11 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/437926 Research Article QoS and Energy Aware Cooperative Routing Protocol for Wildfire Monitoring Wireless Sensor Networks Mohamed Maalej, Sofiane Cherif, and Hichem Besbes Engineering School of Telecommunications of Tunis (Sup’Com), City of Communications Technologies, El Ghazala 2083, Ariana, Tunisia Correspondence should be addressed to Sofane Cherif; sofane.cherif@supcom.rnu.tn Received 22 March 2013; Accepted 12 May 2013 Academic Editors: A. E. Cetin, I. Korpeoglu, B. U. Toreyin, and S. Verstockt Copyright © 2013 Mohamed Maalej et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are presented as proper solution for wildfre monitoring. However, this application requires a design of WSN taking into account the network lifetime and the shadowing efect generated by the trees in the forest environment. Cooperative communication is a promising solution for WSN which uses, at each hop, the resources of multiple nodes to transmit its data. Tus, by sharing resources between nodes, the transmission quality is enhanced. In this paper, we use the technique of reinforcement learning by opponent modeling, optimizing a cooperative communication protocol based on RSSI and node energy consumption in a competitive context (RSSI/energy-CC), that is, an energy and quality-of-service aware-based cooperative communication routing protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs well in terms of network lifetime, packet delay, and energy consumption. 1. Introduction Te automatic monitoring of wildfre generally supports multimodal observations. Tis is due to the extent of the areas to be covered and the difculty of detecting fre. In fact, most fre detection techniques, for example, based on the video, sufer from false alarms. Te use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can improve the quality of the detection and consequently the reduction of the false alarm. WSN can be easily deployed and do not require special auxiliary installation. Tey are mainly used to control buildings, houses, or archaeological sites in the forest. However, the forest environment presents the problem of wide covered areas requiring the transmission of a large amount of information through the network with the risk of signifcant energy consumption and hence limiting the life- time of the network. Particularly, energy parameter is crucial for the wildfre application. Tis is due to the complexity of maintenance of the sensors and the substitution of dead batteries due to the difculty of access to these sensors placed generally in large covered areas. Te second problem which arises in this type of environment is the fading efect due to the presence of trees leading to an important shadowing phenomenon. To solve these problems, we propose a new methodology to design and optimize WSN based on both energy conser- vation and consideration of the quality of transmission for choosing the routing protocol. Cooperative communication is a promising solution for enhancing WSN lifetime. In recent works, this concept has been proposed to exploit the spatial diversity gains in wireless networks [1–3]. Data aggregation in WSN ofen uses multihop transmission techniques. At each hop, the network relies on only one sensor. Tis ofen results in a signifcant decrease in the energy of some sensors and thus limits the lifetime of the network while a large number of sensors are still in working condition. Te main idea of cooperative communication consists in relying, at each hop, on the resources of multiple nodes or relays (called cooperative nodes) to transmit data from one sensor to another, instead of using only one sensor as relay. Tus, by sharing resources between nodes, the transmission quality is enhanced. It is also obvious that the use of a cooperative scheme improves the reliability of communication in case of fre