Load balancing clustering and routing for IoT‐enabled wireless sensor networks

Internet of things (IoT) devices are equipped with a number of interconnected sensor nodes that relies on ubiquitous connectivity between sensor devices to optimize information automation processes. Because of the extensive deployments in adverse areas and unsupervised nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), energy efficiency is a significant aim in these networks. Network survival time can be extended by optimizing its energy consumption. It has been a complex struggle for researchers to develop energy‐efficient routing protocols in the field of WSNs. Energy consumption, path reliability and Quality of Service (QoS) in WSNs became important factors to be focused on enforcing an efficient routing strategy. A hybrid optimization technique presented in this paper is a combination of fuzzy c‐means and Grey Wolf optimization (GWO) techniques for clustering. The proposed scheme was evaluated on different parameters such as total energy consumed, packet delivery ratio, packet drop rate, throughput, delay, remaining energy and total network lifetime. According to the results of the simulation, the proposed scheme improves energy efficiency and throughput by about 30% and packet delivery ratio and latency by about 10%, compared with existing protocols such as Chemical Reaction Approach based Cluster Formation (CHRA), Hybrid Optimal Based Cluster Formation (HOBCF), GWO‐based clustering (GWO‐C) and Cat Swarm Optimization based Energy‐Efficient Reliable sectoring Scheme with prediction algorithms (P_CSO_EERSS). The study concludes that the protocol suitable for creating IoT monitoring system network lifetime is an important criteria.