Reliable energy preserving cluster-based routing policy with optimal route selection for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is one of the hottest research areas, owing to its wider applicability. Due to its effectiveness and inexpensiveness, most of the domains enjoy the benefits of WSN. However, WSN still combats with the major issue, which is energy efficiency. Though WSN is capable of performing numerous activities, the energy stringency controls the actual functionality of WSN. Energy conservation is the crucial requirement of WSN and this paper attempts to propose an energy preserving cluster-based routing policy for WSN. The underlying roots of the proposed approach are clustering approach and optimal route selection. The sensor nodes are clustered and the cluster leader is selected by means of trust level of the nodes. The optimal route selection is performed by cuckoo search algorithm. The performance of the proposed routing policy is analysed and evaluated in terms of packet delivery rate, latency, energy consumption and network lifetime. The proposed approach shows better network lifetime than the existing approaches.