An Improved Routing Protocol for IoT Sensors Utilizing Clustering Techniques and Optimization Methods

In the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a growing urgency to enhance network longevity and minimize energy consumption. This urgency is driven by the fact that energy-limited Sensor Nodes (SNs) present an impressive challenge in IoT, which not only shortens the lifetime of SNs but also consumes more energy. In view of that, this research paper presents a novel protocol titled Innovative Clustering Energy Efficient Equilibrium Optimizer-based Protocol (ICEE-EO-P). In this approach, the rectangular network area is subdivided into equally-sized hexagonal clusters, each of which selects its own Cluster Head (CH) using the EO algorithm, which takes into account three decisive metrics, including the distance of SNs from the sink, their remaining energy, and the average intra-cluster distance, to calculate the fitness function. ICEE-EO-P is a batch-based clustering protocol that ends when the energy of any of the CH dips below a certain threshold. The simulation results of ICEE-EO-P are highly encouraging, demonstrating that our proposed protocol surpasses comparable protocols with regard to enhancing network longevity and remaining energy.