Energy-Efficient QoS-Aware Intelligent Hybrid Clustered Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network consists of numerous low-power microsensor devices that can be deployed in a geographical area for remote sensing, surveillance, control, and monitoring applications. The advancements of wireless devices in terms of user-friendly interface, size, and deployment cost have given rise to many smart applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, certain issues like energy efficiency, long lifetime, and communication reliability restrict their large scale utilization. In WSNs, the cluster-based routing protocols assist nodes to collect, aggregate, and forward sensed data from event regions towards the sink node through minimum cost links. A clustering method helps to improve data transmission efficiency by dividing the sensor nodes into small groups. However, improper cluster head (CH) selection may affect the network lifetime, average network energy, and other quality of service (QoS) parameters. In this paper, a multiobjective clustering strategy is proposed to optimize the energy consumption, network lifetime, network throughput, and network delay. A fitness function has been formulated for heterogenous and homogenous wireless sensor networks. This fitness function is utilized to select an optimum CH for energy minimization and load balancing of cluster heads. A new hybrid clustered routing protocol is proposed based on fitness function. The simulation results conclude that the proposed protocol achieves better efficiency in increasing the network lifetime by 63%, 26%, and 10% compared with three well-known heterogeneous protocols: DEEC, EDDEEC, and ATEER, respectively. The proposed strategy also attains better network stability than a homogenous LEACH protocol.