Imperialist competitive algorithm for increasing the lifetime of wireless sensor network

Abstract

Recent years have seen the rapid growth in the applications of wireless sensor network (WSN) which is due to the advances of sensor nodes with low cost and tiny size. Despite the various potential applications of WSN, one of the key tasks in sensor network design is to make sure that the network is functional as long as possible. This paper presents an energy-efficient cluster head selection algorithm for the clustering of heterogeneous WSN, inspired by Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). In order to reduce the network energy consumption and subsequently increases the sensor network lifetime, the clustering problem is transformed into an optimization problem and the specific cost function is used to select the cluster heads in a way that the energy utilization of the network is optimized. Extensive simulation works are done based on MATLAB to test the algorithm in various network scenarios, with different network sizes and number of nodes. Simulation results have shown that the proposed algorithm is able to extend the network lifetime compared to its comparative by up to 154 percent in terms of first node death. Furthermore, choosing the optimum set of cluster heads at every round has proved that our proposed algorithm not only could reduce the network energy consumption, but also improves the total data delivery at the base station up to 59 percent compared to the well-known algorithm.