A Whale Swarm-Based Energy Efficient Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Developing energy-efficient routing algorithms is key to reducing energy consumption of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and the WSNs energy-efficient routing is a combinatorial optimization problem. Many researchers try to optimize it with metaheuristics. However, most metaheuristics are inappropriate in designing routing algorithms for WSNs due to the individual coding and iteration rule for WSNs routing problem. To solve these problems, this article proposes a whale swarm algorithm with iterative counter-based routing (WSA-ICR) algorithm based on the WSA-IC algorithm. The WSA-ICR algorithm considers the energy consumption of each node and path length in the balanced network and designs a new energy efficiency objective function. Then, the WSA algorithm is improved from five aspects: individual coding, individual initialization, distance calculation between two individuals, individual movement rules, and local search. The WSA-ICR algorithm is compared with several energy efficiency optimization routing algorithms. The simulation results show that the WSA-ICR algorithm has excellent performance in balancing the energy consumption of the whole network, prolonging the network life cycle and convergence speed.