Integrated clustering and routing protocol for wireless sensor networks using Cuckoo and Harmony Search based metaheuristic techniques

Uniform energy consumption and its optimization is a major concern for designing the clustering and routing protocol for large scale wireless sensor networks. Most of the existing nature-inspired computing based solutions for cluster-based routing problem for wireless senor network, suffer from unbalanced energy consumption issues. This is due to fact that nodes near to the sink are overloaded in terms of traffic load. In this research work, problem of energy balanced node clustering and routing between cluster heads and the sink are considered. This paper proposed an improved cuckoo search-based energy balanced node clustering protocol which uses a novel objective function for uniform distribution of cluster heads. In addition, an improved harmony search based routing protocol is proposed for routing of the data packet between cluster heads and the sink. The performance of the proposed integrated clustering and routing protocol is evaluated using the average energy consumption, the number of alive nodes, number of dead nodes and network lifetime. The proposed Cuckoo-Harmony Search-based integrated clustering and routing protocol shows significant improvement over the state-of-art protocols.