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Geographic routing is an attractive routing strategy in wireless sensor networks. It works well in dense networks, but it may suffer from the void problem. For this purpose, a recovery step is required to guarantee packet delivery. Face routing has widely been used as a recovery strategy since proved to guarantee delivery. However, it relies on a planar graph not always achievable in realistic wireless networks and may generate long paths. In this paper, we propose GRACO, a new geographic routing algorithm that combines a greedy forwarding and a recovery strategy based on swarm intelligence. During recovery, ant packets search for alternative paths and drop pheromone trails to guide next packets within the network. GRACO avoids holes and produces near optimal paths. Simulation results demonstrate that GRACO leads to a significant improvement of routing performance and scalability when compared to the literature algorithms.

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The aim of this study is to analyze the determinants of the bank profitability and efficiency in conventional banks. This study compares accounting-based and economic-based measures of efficiency and profitability of conventional banks in fourteen countries. Accounting variables help explain cost and profit efficiency, but cost efficiency has little impact on profitability and profit efficiency. In fact, the study of profitability is crucial in assessing the health of organizations. However, profitability of the banking sector is particularly important as the soundness of the sector is closely related to the soundness of the entire economy. In this paper, banks' profitability and its determinants in Tunisia as well as in 13 different countries were investigated. The determinants of bank profitability are analyzed with the data from 110 banks over the period 1999-2012 using the panel data method generalized method of moments. Our results suggest that researchers should probably focus more on profit efficiency than cost efficiency. Almost all banks are below the optimal size.