Finally, we conducted comparisons by means of simulations in forest fires detection scenario. Compared to RL-SDWSN, the results show an improvement of 14.064 % in network operational lifetime and 16.41 % in response time.

Critical event reporting Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications need vital requirements (extended network lifetime, reliability, real time responsiveness, and scalability) to be met to ensure outstanding efficiency. Previous frameworks only consider few individual requirements, thus ignoring the other equally important ones. Ensuring that an active path is available at all times is crucial for enabling the timely transmission of critical data and maintaining the quality of service required to efficiently support delay-sensitive applications.

Energy conservation is the main issue in wireless sensor networks. Many existing clustering protocols have been proposed to balance the energy consumption and maximize the battery lifetime of sensor nodes.

As well, a fault-tolerant mechanism is proposed to cope up with the failure of CHs and relay nodes. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed protocol using different network scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of ECRP compared with recent and relevant existing protocols in terms of main performance metrics.