Energy aware fault tolerant clustering with routing protocol for improved survivability in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) remain a hot research topic due to its wide range of application areas like environmental monitoring, military surveillance, healthcare, and disaster management. Network survivability is one of the challenging issues in WSN that needs to be maximized for long-run operation of the network. It can be proficiently improved by effective utilization of available energy since the nodes in WSN operate only via in-built batteries. The studies conducted earlier have mainly focused on the design of clustering and routing protocols to reduce energy consumption in the network. With this motivation, the current research paper presents a novel Energy-Aware Fault Tolerant Clustering with Routing for Improved Survivability (EAFTC-RIS) technique in WSN. The proposed EAFTC-RIS technique intends to select the Cluster Heads (CHs) and optimal routes to the destination in an optimal manner with fault tolerant mechanism. The proposed EAFTC-RIS technique primarily designs Moth Flame Optimization (MFO)-based clustering scheme for CH selection and cluster construction. Also, fault tolerant mechanism is considered to further enhance the survivability of the network. In addition, Social Spider Optimization (SSO)-based routing approach is also employed for optimal selection of mutes in WSN. Clustering, routing, and fault tolerant mechanism designs, with multiple input variables, result in enhanced network survivability. The proposed EAFTC-RIS technique was validated for its performance and the outcomes were inspected under various aspects. The simulation outcomes demonstrate the superiority of EAFTC-RIS technique over recent approaches namely, EAFTC-RIS, FUCCAR-GWSO, FBECS, MLSLEEP, and Bee Cluster.