Improved metaheuristic based energy-efficient clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

Energy-efficient clustering protocols are much sought specially for low-power, multi-functional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). With the application of Computational Intelligence (CI) based approaches, various metaheuristics have been developed for energy-efficient clustering in WSNs. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) is one such metaheuristic which arose much interest over other population-based metaheuristics for solving optimization problems in WSNs due to its ease of implementation and adaptive nature. However, its solution search equation, which is poor at exploitation process, contributes to its insufficiency. Thus, we present an improved Artificial Bee Colony (iABC) metaheuristic with an improved solution search equation to improve its exploitation capabilities. Additionally, in order to increase the global convergence of the proposed metaheuristic, an improved population sampling technique is introduced through Student's-t distribution. The proposed metaheuristic maintains a good balance between exploration and exploitation search abilities with least memory requirements, moreover the use of first of its kind compact Student's-t distribution makes it suitable for limited hardware requirements of WSNs. Further, an energy efficient clustering protocol BeeCluster based on iABC metaheuristic is introduced, which inherits the capabilities of the proposed metaheuristic to obtain optimal cluster heads (CHs) and improves energy-efficiency in WSNs. Simulation results show that the proposed clustering protocol outperforms other well known protocols on the basis of packet delivery, throughput, energy consumption, network lifetime and latency as performance metric.