Aiming at the situation that wireless sensor networks with large network coverage area and large number of nodes are prone to premature death of some nodes,an improved ant colony clustering routing protocol RACO-SL based on sector link stra-tegy was proposed.Reward and punishment factors were added,the probability of the ant colony optimization algorithm was used for elite individuals to generate new offspring individuals,and for ordinary individuals,the ant colony optimization algorithm was improved by cross-mutation operation with randomly selected elite individuals,and the optimal cluster node set was selected with the goal of energy consumption optimization of each communication of the entire network.A link forwarding policy was designed for the cluster head node to be forwarded by selecting the next-hop relay node from a dynamically adjustable sector area.Experimental results show that compared with the existing protocol,the protocol performs well in extending the network life,improving communication link qualities,and enhancing network coverages.