Distributed fuzzy approach to unequal clustering and routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Due to inherent issue of energy limitation in sensor nodes, the energy conservation is the primary concern for large‐scale wireless sensor networks. Cluster‐based routing has been found to be an effective mechanism to reduce the energy consumption of sensor nodes. In clustered wireless sensor networks, the network is divided into a set of clusters; each cluster has a coordinator, called cluster head (CH). Each node of a cluster transmits its collected information to its CH that in turn aggregates the received information and sends it to the base station directly or via other CHs. In multihop communication, the CHs closer to the base station are burdened with high relay load; as a result, their energy depletes much faster as compared with other CHs. This problem is termed as the hot spot problem. In this paper, a distributed fuzzy logic‐based unequal clustering approach and routing algorithm (DFCR) is proposed to solve this problem. Based on the cluster design, a multihop routing algorithm is also proposed, which is both energy efficient and energy balancing. The simulation results reinforce the efficiency of the proposed DFCR algorithm over the state‐of‐the‐art algorithms, ie, energy‐aware fuzzy approach to unequal clustering, energy‐aware distributed clustering, and energy‐aware routing algorithm, in terms of different performance parameters like energy efficiency and network lifetime.     

A cluster‐based fault‐tolerant routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation and fault tolerance are two critical issues in the deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many cluster‐based fault‐tolerant routing protocols have been proposed for energy conservation and network lifetime maximization in WSNs. However, these protocols suffer from high frequency of re‐clustering as well as extra energy consumption to tolerate failures and consider only some very normal parameters to form clusters without any verification of the energy sufficiency for data routing. Therefore, this paper proposes a cluster‐based fault‐tolerant routing protocol referred as CFTR. This protocol allows higher energy nodes to become Cluster Heads (CHs) and operate multiple rounds to diminish the frequency of re‐clustering. Additionally, for the sake to get better energy efficiency and balancing, we introduce a cost function that considers during cluster formation energy cost from sensor node to CH, energy cost from CH to sink, and another significant parameter, namely, number of cluster members in previous round. Further, the proposed CFTR takes care of nodes, which have no CH in their communication range. Also, it introduces a routing algorithm in which the decision of next hop CH selection is based on a cost function conceived to select routes with sufficient energy for data transfer and distribute uniformly the overall data‐relaying load among the CHs. As well, a low‐overhead algorithm to tolerate the sudden failure of CHs is proposed. We perform extensive simulations on CFTR and compare their results with those of two recent existing protocols to demonstrate its superiority in terms of different metrics.     

Flower pollination algorithm‐based energy‐efficient stable clustering approach for WSNs

The advances in the size, cost of deployment, and user‐friendly interface of wireless sensor devices have given rise to many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. WSNs need to use protocols for transmitting data samples from event regions to sink through minimum cost links. Clustering is a commonly used method of data aggregation in which nodes are organized into groups to reduce energy consumption. Nonetheless, cluster head (CH) has to bear an additional load in clustering protocols to organize different activities within the cluster. Proper CH selection and load balancing using efficient routing protocol is therefore a critical aspect for WSN's long‐term operation. In this paper, a threshold‐sensitive energy‐efficient cluster‐based routing protocol based on flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is proposed to extend the network's stability period. Using FPA, multihop communication between CHs and base station is used to achieve optimal link costs for load balancing distant CHs and energy minimization. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms competitive clustering algorithms in terms of energy consumption, stability period, and system lifetime.     

A boolean spider monkey optimization based energy efficient clustering approach for WSNs

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of densely distributed nodes that are deployed to observe and react to events within the sensor field. In WSNs, energy management and network lifetime optimization are major issues in the designing of cluster-based routing protocols. Clustering is an efficient data gathering technique that effectively reduces the energy consumption by organizing nodes into groups. However, in clustering protocols, cluster heads (CHs) bear additional load for coordinating various activities within the cluster. Improper selection of CHs causes increased energy consumption and also degrades the performance of WSN. Therefore, proper CH selection and their load balancing using efficient routing protocol is a critical aspect for long run operation of WSN. Clustering a network with proper load balancing is an NP-hard problem. To solve such problems having vast search area, optimization algorithm is the preeminent possible solution. Spider monkey optimization (SMO) is a relatively new nature inspired evolutionary algorithm based on the foraging behaviour of spider monkeys. It has proved its worth for benchmark functions optimization and antenna design problems. In this paper, SMO based threshold-sensitive energy-efficient clustering protocol is proposed to prolong network lifetime with an intend to extend the stability period of the network. Dual-hop communication between CHs and BS is utilized to achieve load balancing of distant CHs and energy minimization. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms existing protocols in terms of energy consumption, system lifetime and stability period.     

DUCR: Distributed unequal cluster‐based routing algorithm for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Designing energy efficient communication protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to conserve the sensors' energy is one of the prime concerns. Clustering in WSNs significantly reduces the energy consumption in which the nodes are organized in clusters, each having a cluster head (CH). The CHs collect data from their cluster members and transmit it to the base station via a single or multihop communication. The main issue in such mechanism is how to associate the nodes to CHs and how to route the data of CHs so that the overall load on CHs are balanced. Since the sensor nodes operate autonomously, the methods designed for WSNs should be of distributed nature, i.e., each node should run it using its local information only. Considering these issues, we propose a distributed multiobjective‐based clustering method to assign a sensor node to appropriate CH so that the load is balanced. We also propose an energy‐efficient routing algorithm to balance the relay load among the CHs. In case any CH dies, we propose a recovery strategy for its cluster members. All our proposed methods are completely distributed in nature. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of energy consumption and hence prolonging the network lifetime. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with some existing algorithms in terms of number of alive nodes, network lifetime, energy efficiency, and energy population.     

DACOR: A distributed ACO-based routing protocol for mitigating the hot spot problem in fog-enabled WSN architecture

Ant colony optimization (ACO) and unequal clustering algorithms in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) prove their efficiency in protracting the network lifetime. However, the existing ACO and unequal clustering algorithms, respectively, do not consider jointly energy efficiency and reliability and focus only on some normal parameters to adjust the cluster radius, then neglecting the cluster head (CH) neighborhood information as it is wise to reduce the cluster radius when there are more neighbor CHs in order to balance the load and energy consumption. To resolve these problems, we propose a fault-tolerant distributed ACO-based routing (DACOR) protocol for mitigating the hot spot problem in fog-enabled WSN architecture. To improve the performance of the network, we propose a multiple fog nodes (FNs) and unequal clustering-based network model. The proposed model is energy efficient as it avoids repetitive clustering and affects CHs to FNs based on distance. Also, unlike the existing works which use either single FN/sink-based unequal clustering or multiple FNs/sinks to mitigate hot spot problem, we propose to distribute unequal clustering to multiple FNs (partitions). Additionally, we formulate a different rule to calculate the cluster radius based on significant parameters ensuring energy efficiency and balancing. To route data from source to destination, we devise a new probabilistic formula which considers not only energy efficiency but also reliability. The performance of the proposed DACOR protocol has been investigated under different scenarios through simulations. The results show that the proposed DACOR protocol outperforms the existing protocols in terms of various main metrics.     

Energy efficient clustering algorithms for wireless sensor networks: novel chemical reaction optimization approach

Clustering has been accepted as one of the most efficient techniques for conserving energy of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, in a two-tiered cluster based WSN, cluster heads (CHs) consume more energy due to extra overload for receiving data from their member sensor nodes, aggregating them and transmitting that data to the base station (BS). Therefore, proper selection of CHs and optimal formation of clusters play a crucial role to conserve the energy of sensor nodes for prolonging the lifetime of WSNs. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient CH selection and energy balanced cluster formation algorithms, which are based on novel chemical reaction optimization technique (nCRO), we jointly called these algorithms as novel CRO based energy efficient clustering algorithms (nCRO-ECA). These algorithms are developed with efficient schemes of molecular structure encoding and potential energy functions. For the energy efficiency, we consider various parameters such as intra-cluster distance, sink distance and residual energy of sensor nodes in the CH selection phase. In the cluster formation phase, we consider various distance and energy parameters. The algorithm is tested extensively on various scenarios of WSNs by varying number of sensor nodes and CHs. The results are compared with original CRO based algorithm, namely CRO-ECA and some existing algorithms to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, packets received by the BS and convergence rate.     

Betweenness centrality based connectivity aware routing algorithm for prolonging network lifetime in wireless sensor networks

Network lifetime is the key design parameter for wireless sensor network protocols. In recent years, based on energy efficient routing techniques numerous methods have been proposed for enhancing network lifetime. These methods have mainly considered residual energy, number of hops and communication cost as route selection metrics. This paper introduces a method for further improvement in the network lifetime by considering network connectivity along with energy efficiency for the selection of data transmission routes. The network lifetime is enhanced by preserving highly connected nodes at initial rounds of data communication to ensure network connectivity during later rounds. Bassed on the above mentioned concept, a connectivity aware routing algorithm: CARA has been proposed. In the proposed algorithm, connectivity factor of a node is calculated on the basis of Betweenness centrality of a node and energy efficient routes are found by using fuzzy logic and ant colony optimization. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm CARA performs better than other related state-of-the-art energy efficient routing algorithms viz. FML, EEABR and FACOR in terms of network lifetime, connectivity, energy dissipation, load balancing and packet delivery ratio.     

A grid based clustering and routing algorithm for solving hot spot problem in wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation of the sensor nodes is the most important issue that has been studied extensively in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In many applications, the nodes closer to the sink are overburdened with huge traffic load as the data from the entire region are forwarded through them to reach the sink. As a result, their energy gets exhausted quickly and the network is partitioned. This is commonly known as hot spot problem. Moreover, sensor nodes are prone to failure due to several factors such as environmental hazards, battery exhaustion, hardware damage and so on. However, failure of cluster heads (CHs) in a two tire WSN is more perilous. Therefore, apart from energy efficiency, any clustering or routing algorithm has to cope with fault tolerance of CHs. In this paper, we address the hot spot problem and propose grid based clustering and routing algorithms, combinedly called GFTCRA (grid based fault tolerant clustering and routing algorithms) which takes care the failure of the CHs. The algorithms follow distributed approach. We also present a distributed run time management for all member sensor nodes of any cluster in case of failure of their CHs. The routing algorithm is also shown to tolerate the sudden failure of the CHs. The algorithms are tested through simulation with various scenarios of WSN and the simulation results show that the proposed method performs better than two other grid based algorithms in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption and number of dead sensor nodes.     

Dynamic Multi-hop Clustering in a Wireless Sensor Network: Performance Improvement

A cluster-based model is preferable in wireless sensor network due to its ability to reduce energy consumption. However, managing the nodes inside the cluster in a dynamic environment is an open challenge. Selecting the cluster heads (CHs) is a cumbersome process that greatly affects the network performance. Although there are several studies that propose CH selection methods, most of them are not appropriate for a dynamic clustering environment. To avoid this problem, several methods were proposed based on intelligent algorithms such as fuzzy logic, genetic algorithm (GA), and neural networks. However, these algorithms work better within a single-hop clustering model framework, and the network lifetime constitutes a big issue in case of multi-hop clustering environments. This paper introduces a new CH selection method based on GA for both single-hop and the multi-hop cluster models. The proposed method is designed to meet the requirements of dynamic environments by electing the CH based on six main features, namely, (1) the remaining energy, (2) the consumed energy, (3) the number of nearby neighbors, (4) the energy aware distance, (5) the node vulnerability, and (6) the degree of mobility. We shall see how the corresponding results show that the proposed algorithm greatly extends the network lifetime.     

A Tabu search based routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, a Tabu search based routing algorithm is proposed to efficiently determine an optimal path from a source to a destination in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). There have been several methods proposed for routing algorithms in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, the Tabu search method is exploited for routing in WSNs from a new point of view. In this algorithm (TSRA), a new move and neighborhood search method is designed to integrate energy consumption and hop counts into routing choice. The proposed algorithm is compared with some of the ant colony optimization based routing algorithms, such as traditional ant colony algorithm, ant colony optimization-based location-aware routing for wireless sensor networks, and energy and path aware ant colony algorithm for routing of wireless sensor networks, in term of routing cost, energy consumption and network lifetime. Simulation results, for various random generated networks, demonstrate that the TSRA, obtains more balanced transmission among the node, reduces the energy consumption and cost of the routing, and extends the network lifetime.     

FUCA: Fuzzy‐based unequal clustering algorithm to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network comprises billions of nodes that work collaboratively, gather data, and transmit to the sink. “Energy hole” or “hotspot” problem is a phenomenon in which nodes near to the sink die prematurely, which causes the network partition. This is because of the imbalance of the consumption of energy by the nodes in wireless sensor networks. This decreases the network's lifetime. Unequal clustering is a technique to cope up with this issue. In this paper, an algorithm, “fuzzy‐based unequal clustering algorithm,” is proposed to prolong the lifetime of the network. This protocol forms unequal clusters. This is to balance the energy consumption. Cluster head selection is done through fuzzy logic approach. Input variables are the distance to base station, residual energy, and density. Competition radius and rank are the two output fuzzy variables. Mamdani method is employed for fuzzy inference. The protocol is compared with well‐known algorithms, like low‐energy adaptive clustering hierarchy, energy‐aware unequal clustering fuzzy, multi‐objective fuzzy clustering algorithm, and fuzzy‐based unequal clustering under different network scenarios. In all the scenarios, the proposed protocol performs better. It extends the lifetime of the network as compared with its counterparts.     

A New Method to Find a High Reliable Route in IoT by Using Reinforcement Learning and Fuzzy Logic

Recently, Internet is moving quickly toward the interaction of objects, computing devices, sensors, and which are usually indicated as the Internet of things (IoT). The main monitoring infrastructure of IoT systems main monitoring infrastructure of IoT systems is wireless sensor networks. A wireless sensor network is composed of a large number of sensor nodes. Each sensor node has sensing, computing, and wireless communication capability. The sensor nodes send the data to a sink or a base station by using wireless transmission techniques However, sensor network systems require suitable routing structure to optimizing the lifetime. For providing reasonable energy consumption and optimizing the lifetime of WSNs, novel, efficient and economical schemes should be developed. In this paper, for enhancing network lifetime, a novel energy-efficient mechanism is proposed based on fuzzy logic and reinforcement learning. The fuzzy logic system and reinforcement learning is based on the remained energies of the nodes on the routes, the available bandwidth and the distance to the sink. This study also compares the performance of the proposed method with the fuzzy logic method and IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. The simulations of the proposed method which were carried out by OPNET (Optimum Network performance) indicated that the proposed method performed better than other protocols such as fuzzy logic and IEEE802.15.4 in terms of power consumption and network lifetime.

     

A particle swarm optimization based energy efficient cluster head selection algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Clustering has been proven to be one of the most efficient techniques for saving energy of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, in a hierarchical cluster based WSN, cluster heads (CHs) consume more energy due to extra overload for receiving and aggregating the data from their member sensor nodes and transmitting the aggregated data to the base station. Therefore, the proper selection of CHs plays vital role to conserve the energy of sensor nodes for prolonging the lifetime of WSNs. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient cluster head selection algorithm which is based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) called PSO-ECHS. The algorithm is developed with an efficient scheme of particle encoding and fitness function. For the energy efficiency of the proposed PSO approach, we consider various parameters such as intra-cluster distance, sink distance and residual energy of sensor nodes. We also present cluster formation in which non-cluster head sensor nodes join their CHs based on derived weight function. The algorithm is tested extensively on various scenarios of WSNs, varying number of sensor nodes and the CHs. The results are compared with some existing algorithms to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.     

An optimised fuzzy clustering for wireless sensor networks

Minimising energy consumption has always been an issue of crucial importance in sensor networks. Most of the energy is consumed in data transmission from sensor nodes to the base station due to the long distance of nodes from the base station. In the recent past, a number of researchers have proposed that clustering is an efficient way of reducing the energy consumption during data transmission and enhancing the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Many algorithms have been already proposed for cluster head selection. In this work, we analyse and compare the lifetime of the network with three different fuzzy-based approaches of cluster head selection. The three strong parameters which play an important role in lifetime enhancement – energy, centrality and node density – are considered for cluster head selection in our proposed fuzzy approaches. In the first approach, energy and centrality are considered simultaneously in a fuzzy system to select the cluster heads. In the second approach, energy and node density have been taken in a fuzzy system to select the cluster heads. In the third approach, node density and centrality are considered simultaneously by a fuzzy system to select the cluster heads. Simulation results of these fuzzy logic-based approaches show that all the three approaches are superior to the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH). Simulation results also show that the energy-centrality-based fuzzy clustering scheme gives best performance among all the three fuzzy-based algorithms and it enhances the lifetime of wireless sensor networks by a significant amount.     

Performance Analysis of Adaptive Routing Structure for Wireless Sensor Network Based on Load Balancing

Wireless sensor network consists of sensor nodes with battery operated device. The key challenges in the wireless sensor network are energy consumption and routing optimization. This work presents the cluster based load balancing (CBLB) routing protocol. The proposed routing protocol is used to minimize the energy consumption and increase the routing performance. It avoids the routing robustness, delay and increases the delivery rate and network performance. In existing techniques, different routing protocols such as LEACH, HEED and MESTER were used to increase the network performance and to decrease the energy consumption. But these existing techniques did not satisfy the performance requirements of wireless sensor networks. Hence, there is a requirement to develop a technique that meets the QoS requirements and needs of wireless sensor network. The proposed CBLB routing protocol creates a cluster head in the decentralized network and the cluster head will be used to distribute the workload evenly to the cluster members for reducing the energy consumption in wireless sensor network. Experimental results analyze the performance of the proposed protocol with the different existing protocols. The proposed protocol achieves high throughput, delivery rate and reduces the energy consumption, delay and routing overhead.     

A green cluster‐based routing scheme for large‐scale wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), clustering has been shown to be an efficient technique to improve scalability and network lifetime. In clustered networks, clustering creates unequal load distribution among cluster heads (CHs) and cluster member (CM) nodes. As a result, the entire network is subject to premature death because of the deficient active nodes within the network. In this paper, we present clustering‐based routing algorithms that can balance out the trade‐off between load distribution and network lifetime “green cluster‐based routing scheme.” This paper proposes a new energy‐aware green cluster‐based routing algorithm to preventing premature death of large‐scale dense WSNs. To deal with the uncertainty present in network information, a fuzzy rule‐based node classification model is proposed for clustering. Its primary benefits are flexibility in selecting effective CHs, reliability in distributing CHs overload among the other nodes, and reducing communication overhead and cluster formation time in highly dense areas. In addition, we propose a routing scheme that balances the load among sensors. The proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations to compare our scheme with the existing algorithms available in the literature. The numerical results show the relevance and improved efficiency of our scheme.     

ECRP: an energy-aware cluster-based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation is the main issue in wireless sensor networks. Many existing clustering protocols have been proposed to balance the energy consumption and maximize the battery lifetime of sensor nodes. However, these protocols suffer from the excessive overhead due to repetitive clustering resulting in high-energy consumption. In this paper, we propose energy-aware cluster-based routing protocol (ECRP) in which not only the cluster head (CH) role rotates based on energy around all cluster members until the end of network functioning to avoid frequent re-clustering, but also it can adapt the network topology change. Further, ECRP introduces a multi-hop routing algorithm so that the energy consumption is minimized and balanced. As well, a fault-tolerant mechanism is proposed to cope up with the failure of CHs and relay nodes. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed protocol using different network scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of ECRP compared with recent and relevant existing protocols in terms of main performance metrics.

     

Distributed fuzzy logic based energy‐aware and coverage preserving unequal clustering algorithm for wireless sensor networks

In an energy‐constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs), clustering is found to be an effective strategy to minimize the energy depletion of sensor nodes. In clustered WSNs, network is partitioned into set of clusters, each having a coordinator called cluster head (CH), which collects data from its cluster members and forwards it to the base station (BS) via other CHs. Clustered WSNs often suffer from the hot spot problem where CHs closer to the BS die much early because of high energy consumption contributed by the data forwarding load. Such death of nodes results coverage holes in the network very early. In most applications of WSNs, coverage preservation of the target area is a primary measure of quality of service. Considering the energy limitation of sensors, most of the clustering algorithms designed for WSNs focus on energy efficiency while ignoring the coverage requirement. In this paper, we propose a distributed clustering algorithm that uses fuzzy logic to establish a trade‐off between the energy efficiency and coverage requirement. This algorithm considers both energy and coverage parameters during cluster formation to maximize the coverage preservation of target area. Further, to deal with hot spot problem, it forms unequal sized clusters such that more CHs are available closer to BS to share the high data forwarding load. The performance of the proposed clustering algorithm is compared with some of the well‐known existing algorithms under different network scenarios. The simulation results validate the superiority of our algorithm in network lifetime, coverage preservation, and energy efficiency.     

Multi-objective fractional artificial bee colony algorithm to energy aware routing protocol in wireless sensor network

Due to the promising application of collecting information from remote or inaccessible location, wireless sensor networks pose big challenge for data routing to maximize the communication with more energy efficient. Literature presents different cluster-based energy aware routing protocol for maximizing the life time of sensor nodes. Accordingly, an energy efficient clustering mechanism, based on artificial bee colony algorithm and factional calculus is proposed in this paper to maximize the network energy and life time of nodes by optimally selecting cluster-head. The hybrid optimization algorithm called, multi-objective fractional artificial bee colony is developed to control the convergence rate of ABC with the newly designed fitness function which considered three objectives like, energy consumption, distance travelled and delays to minimize the overall objective. The performance of the proposed FABC-based cluster head selection is compared with LEACH, PSO and ABC-based routing using life time, and energy. The results proved that the proposed FABC maximizes the energy as well as life time of nodes as compared with existing protocols.