A Technique for Cluster Head Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks Using African Vultures Optimization Algorithm

INTRODUCTION: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has caught the interest of researchers due to the rising popularity of Internet of things(IOT) based smart products and services. In challenging environmental conditions, WSN employs a large number of nodes with limited battery power to sense and transmit data to the base station(BS). Direct data transmission to the BS uses a lot of energy in these circumstances. Selecting the CH in a clustered WSN is considered to be an NP-hard problem. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this work to provide an effective cluster head selection method that minimize the overall network energy consumption, improved throughput with the main goal of enhanced network lifetime. METHODS: In this work, a meta heuristic based cluster head selection technique is proposed that has shown an edge over the other state of the art techniques. Cluster compactness, intra-cluster distance, and residual energy are taken into account while choosing CH using multi-objective function. Once the CHs have been identified, data transfer from the CHs to the base station begins. The residual energy of the nodes is finally updated during the data transmission begins. RESULTS: An analysis of the results has been performed based on average energy consumption, total energy consumption, network lifetime and throughput using two different WSN scenarios. Also, a comparison of the performance has been made other techniques namely Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Atom Search Optimization (ASO), Gorilla Troop Optimization (GTO), Harmony Search (HS), Wild Horse Optimization (WHO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Firefly Algorithm (FA) and Biogeography Based Optimization (BBO). The findings show that AVOA's first node dies at round 1391 in Scenario-1 and round 1342 in Scenario-2 which is due to lower energy consumption by the sensor nodes thus increasing lifespan of the WSN network. CONCLUSION: As per the findings, the proposed technique outperforms ABC, ACO, ASO, GTO, HS, WHO, PSO, FA, and BBO in terms of performance evaluation parameters and boosting the reliability of networks over the other state of art techniques.