Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) energy saving has become one of the prime optimization problem and clustering technique has been considered as most efficient techniques to achieve the same. The selection of cluster heads (CHs) plays a vital role in hierarchical based WSNs as it consume more energy owing to its additional duty of receiving, aggregating the data from the cluster member nodes and transmitting the same to the base station (BS). Improper selection of CHs causes impact on network life time. In order to have an energy efficient network a suitable optimization algorithm is to be adopted to select the CHs. We propose a cluster protocol based on Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO) algorithm to reduce the energy consumption during cluster setup phase and transmission phase. The CSO cluster protocol is developed by considering intra-cluster distance of nodes to CH and residual energy of cluster member nodes. The algorithm is tested extensively on various scenarios of WSNs, varying number of sensor nodes and the CHs. The energy efficient scheme of proposed CSO performance is compared with other well-known protocols such as Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy -Centralized (LEACH-C) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based protocol to prove the superiority of it.