Maximizing network lifetime is the main goal of designing a wireless sensor network. Clustering and routing can effectively balance network energy consumption and prolong network lifetime. This paper presents a novel cluster-based routing protocol called EECRAIFA. In order to select the optimal cluster heads, Self-Organizing Map neural network is used to perform preliminary clustering on the network nodes, and then the relative reasonable level of the cluster, the cluster head energy, the average distance within the cluster and other factors are introduced into the firefly algorithm (FA) to optimize the network clustering. In addition, the concept of decision domain is introduced into the FA to further disperse cluster heads and form reasonable clusters. In the inter-cluster routing stage, the inter-cluster routing is established by an improved ant colony optimization (ACO). Considering factors such as the angle, distance and energy of the node, the heuristic function is improved to make the selection of the next hop more targeted. In addition, the coefficient of variation in statistics is introduced into the process of updating pheromones, and the path is optimized by combining energy and distance. In order to further improve the network throughput, a polling control mechanism based on busy/idle nodes is introduced during the intra-cluster communication phase. The simulation experiment results prove that under different application scenarios, EECRAIFA can effectively balance the network energy consumption, extend the network lifetime, and improve network throughput.
