Moth Flame Optimization Based Energy Efficient Stable Clustered Routing Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

The widespread use of wireless sensor devices and their advancements in terms of size, deployment cost and user friendly interface have given rise to many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). WSNs need to utilize routing protocols to forward data samples from event regions to sink via minimum cost links. Clustering is an efficient data aggregation method that effectively reduces the energy consumption by organizing nodes into groups. However, in clustering protocols, CH has to bear an additional load for coordinating various activities within the cluster. Therefore, proper CH selection and their load balancing using efficient routing protocol is a critical aspect for the long run operation of WSN. Clustering a network with proper load balancing is an NP-hard problem. To solve such problems having vast search area, optimization algorithm is the preeminent possible solution. In this paper, moth flame optimization (MFO) based threshold-sensitive energy-efficient clustering protocol (TECP) is proposed to extend the stability period of the network. Multi-hop communication between CHs and BS is utilized using MFO to achieve optimal link cost for load balancing of distant CHs and energy minimization. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methodology significantly outperforms existing protocols in terms of energy consumption, system lifetime and stability period.