A unified heuristic bat algorithm to optimize the LEACH protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have high value in the field of wireless communications. As the earliest WSN clustering protocol, Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) can effectively reduce the energy consumption of data transmission in sensor networks. However, LEACH has some problems such as cluster head nodes are unevenly distributed. In this paper, a unified heuristic bat algorithm (UHBA) is proposed to optimize elections in cluster heads. This algorithm guarantees that the election of cluster heads can freely transform both global search and local search. Meanwhile, comparing with several other variants of the bat algorithm in CEC2013 test suite, it can be seen from results that UHBA has better performance. Moreover, the application of the algorithm on LEACH is better than other algorithms, which further proves that the algorithm has better results.