An Efficient Multi-Cluster Wireless Sensor Network Based on Optimal Cluster Head Selection Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are crucial in various scientific, industrial and infrastructure monitoring applications, in which the sensing, processing, and communication tasks are performed by the distributed sensors, without the presence of any human beings. WSNs have various drawbacks, among which is the power limitation of sensor nodes, which impacts the life of the network and its reliability, due to their battery power. The main problem is the selection of cluster heads (CHs) as CH selection in conventional protocols may be ad hoc/Random which may cause energy imbalance and network failure, which is very common in conventional protocols. The main idea of this study is to present a multi-cluster WSN model with optimal CH selection (the MO model) in which the CHs are selected by a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, by solving a multipurpose optimization problem based on three criteria: residual energy, distance between candidate CHs and the base station, and intra-cluster distance. The proposed MO model is tested against three baseline models: single-cluster arbitrary selection (SA), multi-cluster arbitrary selection (MA), and single-cluster optimal selection (SO) and tested over 50, 100 and 200 network sizes. Residual energy, number of alive nodes, total energy consumption, network stability and PSO convergence rate are used to evaluate the performance. In all three sizes of the network, the MO model always consumes less energy than the baseline models (up to 52% in the three networks at 200 nodes, when the number of alive nodes is half that of the MO model at equivalent simulation rounds) and significantly outperforms all three baseline models in terms of normalized size stability (up to 1.00 in the three networks at 100 nodes, compared with at most 0.30 for the baseline models). The obtained results indicate that multi-clustering and joint optimization of CH selection, taking into account multiple energy relevant criteria yields substantial, stable gains in energy-efficiency and life-time of the WSN in comparison to arbitrary CH selection and a single criterion CH selection scheme.