Energy efficient clustering protocol for WSN using PSO

Clustering is an efficient topology control method to reduce energy consumption of the sensor nodes for maximizing lifetime and scalability of WSNs. The number of elected cluster heads can affect the network lifetime significantly. In this paper, a PSO-based protocol is used to find the optimal number of cluster heads to maximize the network energy efficiency. At the same time, the network coverage and links quality are taken into account. Furthermore, the effect of using realistic network and energy consumption model in cluster-based communication for WSN was investigated. Extensive simulations show that the proposed protocol outperforms the well-known cluster-based sensor network protocols in terms of average energy consumption while at the same time has acceptable data packets throughput.