Mobility management protocol in wireless sensor networks based on FireFly algorithm

Mobile Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN) has mobile sensor nodes which sense the data and communicate with the base station via other nodes. Both sensor nodes and base stations can be mobile and operate with static sensor nodes in the network based on the application requirements. However, mobility poses new challenges for the researchers particularly in energy consumption and packets loss in addition to routing protocols are responsible for discovering and maintaining the routes in the network. In this paper, a new routing protocol is proposed for mobile wireless sensors, which was invented after a thorough study of various protocols in the literature that try to resolve the typical routing issues for both technologies of WSNs and MWSNs. Our proposed protocol takes the advantages of the MH-LEACH-1R protocol, as well as properties of the firefly optimization. To show the performance of the proposed protocol, we have performed some simulations, comparisons, and analysis using MATLAB environment. These routing protocols (LEACH-M, MH-LEACH-1R, and our protocol) are compared based on different factors such as data delivery to the base station, packets loss, and residual energy. Experimental results show that our proposed protocol has the best performance in almost all metrics especially lifetime and lost packets.