PSO-HC: Particle Swarm Optimization Protocol for Hierarchical Clustering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Clustering is an efficient topology control approach for maximizing the lifetime and scalability of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Many cluster-based routing techniques have been proposed in the literature. However, in most of the proposed protocols, the communication between a sensor node and its designated cluster head (CH) is assumed to be single-hop. Multi-hop communication can be used when the communication range of the sensor nodes is limited or the number of sensor nodes is very large in a network. Moreover, they used a predetermined percentage of CHs regardless of the network density or the number of live nodes. Clustering is known to be non-deterministic polynomial (NP)-hard problems for a WSN. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a swarm intelligent approach that can be applied for finding fast and efficient solutions of such problems. In this paper, we propose a novel centralized PSO protocol for Hierarchical Clustering (PSO-HC) in WSNs. Our objective is to maximize the network lifetime by minimizing the number of active CHs and to maximize the network scalability by using two-hop communication between the sensor nodes and their respective CHs. The effect of using a realistic network and energy consumption model in cluster-based communication for WSN was investigated. Extensive simulations show that PSO-HC outperforms the well-known cluster-based sensor network protocols in terms of average consumed energy and throughput.