| Abstract: | Non‐uniform energy consumption during operation of a cluster‐based routing protocol for large‐scale wireless sensor networks (WSN) is major area of concern. Unbalanced energy consumption in the wireless network results in early node death and reduces the network lifetime. This is because nodes near the sink are overloaded in terms of data traffic compared with the far away nodes resulting in node deaths. In this work, a novel residual energy–based distributed clustering and routing (REDCR) protocol has been proposed, which allows multi‐hop communication based on cuckoo‐search (CS) algorithm and low‐energy adaptive‐clustering–hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. LEACH protocol allows choice of possible cluster heads by rotation at every round of data transmission by a newly developed objective function based on residual energy of the nodes. The information about the location and energy of the nodes is forwarded to the sink node where CS algorithm is implemented to choose optimal number of cluster heads and their positions in the network. This approach helps in uniform distribution of the cluster heads throughout the network and enhances the network stability. Several case studies have been performed by varying the position of the base stations and by changing the number of nodes in the area of application. The proposed REDCR protocol shows significant improvement by an average of 15% for network throughput, 25% for network scalability, 30% for network stability, 33% for residual energy conservation, and 60% for network lifetime proving this approach to be more acceptable one in near future. |
