Design of Evolutionary Algorithm Based Unequal Clustering for Energy Aware Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) play a vital role in several real-time applications ranging from military to civilian. Despite the benefits of WSN, energy efficiency becomes a major part of the challenging issue in WSN, which necessitate proper load balancing amongst the clusters and serves a wider monitoring region. The clustering technique for WSN has several benefits: lower delay, higher energy efficiency, and collision avoidance. But clustering protocol has several challenges. In a large-scale network, cluster-based protocols mainly adapt multi-hop routing to save energy, leading to hot spot problems. A hot spot problem becomes a problem where a cluster node nearer to the base station (BS) tends to drain the energy much quicker than other nodes because of the need to implement more transmission. This article introduces a Jumping Spider Optimization Based Unequal Clustering Protocol for Mitigating Hotspot Problems (JSOUCP-MHP) in WSN. The JSO algorithm is stimulated by the characteristics of spiders naturally and mathematically modelled the hunting mechanism such as search, persecution, and jumping skills to attack prey. The presented JSOUCP-MHP technique mainly resolves the hot spot issue for maximizing the network lifespan. The JSOUCP-MHP technique elects a proper set of cluster heads (CHs) using average residual energy (RE) to attain this. In addition, the JSOUCP-MHP technique determines the cluster sizes based on two measures, i.e., RE and distance to BS (DBS), showing the novelty of the work. The proposed JSOUCP-MHP technique is examined under several experiments to ensure its supremacy. The comparison study shows the significance of the JSOUCP-MHP technique over other models.