Novel chemical reaction optimization based unequal clustering and routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Energy conserving of sensor nodes is the most crucial issue in the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In a cluster based routing approach, cluster heads (CHs) cooperate with each other to forward their data to the base station (BS) via multi-hop routing. In this process, CHs closer to the BS are burdened with heavier relay traffic and tend to die prematurely which causes network partition is popularly known as a hot spot problem. To mitigate the hot spot problem, in this paper, we propose unequal clustering and routing algorithms based on novel chemical reaction optimization (nCRO) paradigm, we jointly call these algorithms as novel CRO based unequal clustering and routing algorithms (nCRO-UCRA). In clustering, we partition the network into unequal clusters such that smaller size clusters near to the sink and larger size clusters relatively far away from the sink. For this purpose, we develop the CH selection algorithm based on nCRO paradigm and assign the non-cluster head sensor nodes to the CHs based on derived cost function. Then, a routing algorithm is presented which is also based on nCRO based approach. All these algorithms are developed with the efficient schemes of molecular structure encoding and novel potential energy functions. The nCRO-UCRA is simulated extensively on various scenarios of WSNs and varying number of sensors and the CHs. The results are compared with some existing algorithms and original CRO based algorithm called as CRO-UCRA to show the superiority in terms of various performance metrics like residual energy, network lifetime, number of alive nodes, data packets received by the BS and convergence rate.