PSO-based approach for energy-efficient and energy-balanced routing and clustering in wireless sensor networks

Many schemes have been proposed for energy-efficient routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, most of these algorithms focus only on energy efficiency in which each node finds a shortest path to the base station (BS), but remain silent about energy balancing which is equally important to prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose particle swarm optimization-based routing and clustering algorithms for WSNs. The routing algorithm builds a trade-off between energy efficiency and energy balancing, whereas the clustering algorithm takes care of the energy consumption of gateways as well as sensor nodes. We develop an efficient particle-encoding scheme and derive a multi-objective fitness function for each of the proposed routing and clustering algorithms. The algorithms are also capable of tolerating the failure of cluster heads. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed schemes and the results are compared with the existing algorithms to demonstrate their superiority in terms of various performance metrics.