An Improved Coyote Optimization Algorithm-Based Clustering for Extending Network Lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks

The development of lightweight, low energy and small-sized sensors incorporated with the wireless networks has brought about a phenomenal growth of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in its different fields of applications. Moreover, the routing of data is crucial in a wide number of critical applications that includes ecosystem monitoring, military and disaster management. However, the time-delay, energy imbalance and minimized network lifetime are considered as the key problems faced during the process of data transmission. Furthermore, only when the functionality of cluster head selection is available in WSNs, it is possible to improve energy and network lifetime. Besides that, the task of cluster head selection is regarded as an NP-hard optimization problem that can be effectively modelled using hybrid metaheuristic approaches. Due to this reason, an Improved Coyote Optimization Algorithm based Clustering Technique (ICOACT) is proposed for extending the lifetime for making efficient choices for cluster heads while maintaining a consistent balance between exploitation and exploration. The issue of premature convergence and its tendency of being trapped into the local optima in the Improved Coyote Optimization Algorithm (ICOA) through the selection of center solution is used for replacing the best solution in the search space during the clustering functionality. The simulation results of the proposed ICOACT confirmed its efficiency by increasing the number of alive nodes, the total number of clusters formed with the least amount of end-to-end delay and mean packet loss rate.