Imperialist Competition Based Clustering Algorithm to Improve the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network

In Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes have limited energy and cannot be recharged. Clustering is one of the major approaches to optimize consumption of energy and data gathering. In these networks, clustering must be special to prolong network lifetime. In WSN, clustering has heuristic nature and belongs to NP-hard problems. In complex problems, search space is too big and grows exponentially. Because it takes too much time and cost, finding a deterministic optimized solution is difficult in such a short time. In this situation population-based algorithms are beneficial in finding optimum solutions. In this paper, a clustering algorithm is investigated and a novel idea, in line with the population-based algorithm, is presented. The proposed algorithm uses Imperialist Competition Algorithm (ICA) for the clustering of nodes. The results show that this algorithm postpones the dead time of nodes and prolongs network lifetime, compared to other discussed clustering algorithms.