Improved Cuckoo Search-based Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In a large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), designing of an energy efficient data gathering protocol has become a challenging research issues. This is due to fact that each sensor node is generally equipped with limited energy resource. In the literature, clustering-based technique for data gathering has been proved very efficient in terms of energy saving. Although, it is pointed out in the literature that design of an energy-balanced clustering for maximizing the network lifetime of WSNs is a NP hard problem. For solving this NP-hard problem, many meta-heuristic approach based clustering protocols are proposed in the recent years. However, these existing clustering protocols suffer from unbalanced energy consumption problem. In this problem, cluster heads are not uniformly distributed and overloaded cluster heads die out faster than under-load cluster heads. In order to solve this problem, an improved Cuckoo Search-based Clustering Algorithm (ICSCA) is proposed in this research paper. Performance evaluation of the ICSCA and its comparison with the state-of-art clustering scheme in terms total energy consumption and residual energy are presented. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.