Improved harmony search based clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks with mobile sink

In mobile sink based wireless sensor networks, design of an energy efficient and scalable clustering protocol remains a critical research challenge. In clustering protocol, selection of cluster heads is an NP-hard problem. There are many solutions are proposed in the literature for this problem. Existing solutions are not energy efficient and scalable and suffers from energy hole problem. In order to solve energy hole problem, this paper proposes an Improved Harmony Search Based Clustering protocol for mobile sink based WSNs where a novel objective function is used for determining the cluster heads. In addition, mobile sink re-localization algorithm is also incorporated to reduce and balance the energy consumption. Performance comparisons of the proposed protocol with the well-known protocols are evaluated by varying different network scenario.