Improving Network Lifetime in IoT Sensor Network Based on Particle Swarm Optimization, Clustering, and Mobile Sink

Recently, extending the network lifetime and reducing energy consumption have become pressing necessities in the Internet of Things (IoT). Meanwhile, the energy-constrained sensor nodes pose a challenging problem that diminishes the nodes’ lifetime, and so as the entire network system due to energy depletion. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an innovative energy-aware cluster-based protocol considering an adaptive Mobile Sink (MS) movement and utilizing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Accordingly, the circular network area is divided into clusters, where each cluster has its own elected cluster head, depending on the PSO method. The MS, in the proposed work, intends to balance the energy among nodes, thereby avoiding the hotspot problem. In particular, it moves in a circular pattern with constant angular velocity to ensure better coverage. This movement is initiated from the center of the network area and then goes along the radius of the network on a forward and backward basis. The simulation results obtained are so promising and particularly show that our proposed protocol outperforms its counterparts in terms of the network lifetime.