A modified whale-dragonfly algorithm and self-adaptive cuckoo search-based clustering strategy for augmenting network lifetime in wireless sensor networks

Designing an energy efficient and durable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a key challenge as it personifies potential and reactive functionalities in harsh antagonistic environment at which wired system deployment is completely infeasible. Majority of the clustering mechanisms contributed to the literature concentrated on augmenting network lifetime and energy stability. However, energy consumption incurred by cluster heads (CHs) are high and thereby results in minimized network lifetime and frequent CHs selection. In this paper, a modified whale-dragonfly optimization algorithm and self-adaptive cuckoo search-based clustering strategy (MWIDOA-SACS) is proposed for sustaining energy stability and augment network lifetime. In specific, MWIDOA-SACS is included for exploiting the fitness values that aids in determining two optimal nodes that are selected as optimal CH and cluster router (CR) nodes in the network. In MWIDOA, the search conduct of dragon flies is completely updated through whale optimization algorithm (WOA) for preventing load balancing at CHs. It minimized the overhead of CH by adopting CHs and CR for collecting information from cluster members and transmitting the aggregated data from CHs to the base station (BS). It included self-adaptive cuckoo search (SACS) for achieving sink mobility using radius, energy stability, received signal strength, and throughput for achieving optimal data transmission process after partitioning the network into unequal clusters. Simulation experiments of the proposed MWIDOA-SACS confirmed better performance in terms of total residual energy by 21.28% and network lifetime by 26.32%, compared to the competitive CH selection strategies.