An Efficient Load Balancing of Gateways Using Improved Shuffled Frog Leaping Algorithm and Novel Fitness Function for WSNs

Energy consumption is one of the important factors in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) design. As energy is a limited resource, energy consumption problem in WSNs has become a fast growing problem, and there is a need of efficient and robust algorithms for load balancing in WSNs. This energy is needed for sensor nodes operations. In order to maximize the network lifetime, energy consumption should be optimized. In cluster-based WSNs, cluster heads or gateways perform activities, such as data collection from its member nodes, data aggregation, and data exchange with the base station. Hence, load balancing of gateways in WSNs is one of the crucial and challenging tasks to maximize network lifetime. In order to address this problem, in this paper, shuffled frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) is improved by suitably modifying the frog's population generation and off-spring generation phases in SFLA and by introducing a transfer phase. A novel fitness function is also designed to evaluate the quality of the solutions produced by the improved SFLA. We performed extensive simulations of the proposed load balancing algorithm in terms of various performance parameters. The experimental results are encouraging and demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.