Improved energy efficient WSN using ACO based HSA for optimal cluster head selection

In recent era, increased consumption of energy in the wireless sensor network (WSN) is considered as a critical issue. The main constraints associated with these networks is the lower transmission range, reduced battery power and reduced memory requirement. There are very few designs that concentrates on designing newer routing protocol that considers these parameters for optimal selection of routes to reduce the energy consumption. With such aim, the proposed method designs a new routing protocol with optimal parameter selection. In addition, the study considers faster transmission of packets without losing the data accuracy. The network is divided into clusters, where the cluster center (center of the circle) is assumed to have minimum density in its own cluster. A path based clustering using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is used for this purpose. Here, the minimum density cluster is selected using Harmonic Search Algorithm (HSA). The ACO combined with HSA finds the optimal cluster head with minimum routing path with reduced energy consumption. The validation of the proposed method is carried out against ACO-Fuzzy, max-min ACO, mACO and ACO in terms of various performance metrics. The result shows that the proposed method achieves higher network throughput, maximum network lifetime and reduced consumption of energy than other methods.