Competitive swarm optimization based unequal clustering and routing algorithms (CSO-UCRA) for wireless sensor networks

Cluster based routing approaches have been researched extensively for saving energy of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In a cluster based routing mechanism, cluster heads (CHs) cooperate mutually to forward their data to the base station (BS) through multi-hop fashion. Due to this process, CHs near to the BS loaded with huge relay traffic and tend to die quickly, which causes partition of the network is popularly known as a hot-spot problem. To tackle the hot-spot problem, in this paper, competitive swarm optimization (CSO) based algorithms have been proposed, jointly call these algorithms as CSO-UCRA (CSO based Unequal Clustering and Routing Algorithms). First, the CH selection algorithm has been presented which is based on CSO based technique, next assign the non-CH sensors to CHs based on the derived CHproficiency function. Finally, a CSO based routing algorithm has been presented. Efficient particle encoding schemes and novel fitness functions have been developed for these algorithms. The CSO-UCRA is simulated extensively with varying number of sensor nodes and CHs for various WSN scenarios, and the obtained results are compared with some recent devised algorithms and standard meta-heuristic based algorithm called PSO-UCRA to show the efficiancy in terms of various performance metrics. CSO-UCRA shows decreased energy consumption of 28.48%, 22.55%, 12.92%, and 3.81%, increased network lifetime of 56.92%, 46.02%, 26.2%, and 8.04% and increased data packets received 73%, 52.5%, 20.8%, and 6.18% over EBUC, EAUCF, EPUC and PSO-UCRA respectively.