Optimal Sink Node Placement in Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Harris’ Hawk Optimization Algorithm

Large-scale wireless sensor network (LSWSN) is composed of a huge number of sensor nodes that are distributed in some region of interest (ROI), to sense and measure the environmental conditions like pressure, temperature, pollution levels, humidity, wind, and so on. The objective is to collect data for real-time monitoring so that appropriate actions can be taken promptly. One of the sensor nodes used in an LSWSN is called the sink node, which is responsible for processing and analyzing the collected information. It works as a station between the network sensor nodes and the administrator. Also, it is responsible for controlling the whole network. Determining the sink node location in an LSWSN is a challenging task, as it is crucial to the network lifetime, for keeping the network activity to the most possible extent. In this paper, the Harris’ hawks optimization (HHO) algorithm is employed to solve this problem and subsequently the Prim’s shortest path algorithm is used to reconstruct the network by making minimum transmission paths from the sink node to the rest of the sensor nodes. The performance of HHO is compared with other well-known algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), flower pollination algorithm (FPA), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), multi-verse optimizer (MVO), and whale optimization algorithm (WOA). The simulation results of different network sizes, with single and multiple sink nodes, show the superiority of the employed approach in terms of energy consumption and localization error, and ultimately prolonging the lifetime of the network in an efficacious way.