Bio-inspired routing protocol for wireless sensor network to minimise the energy consumption

The minimisation of energy consumption has become an emerging topic in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as these networks enable a wealth of new applications. The internet of things (IoT) application is one of them and the current hype around the IoT is huge. Therefore, the development of efficient communication protocols for WSNs is a major concern. In this context, various research communities have triggered several optimisation techniques to provide energy-efficient solutions to WSNs. This study aims to apply the genetic algorithm (GA) in WSNs clustering and to evaluate its performance over another optimisation technique. The proposed protocol is analytically analysed and compared with a fuzzy logic (FL)-based routing protocol and traditional routing protocol like LEACH and K-means using a Java-based custom simulator. Simulation results show that there is a trade-off between GA-clustering and FL-clustering, but the overall performance of GA-clustering is very promising for obtaining optimal energy consumption.