In wireless sensor networks, the energy source is limited to the capacity of the sensor node’s battery. Clustering in WSN can help with reducing energy consumption because transmission energy is related to the distance between sender and receiver. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy logic model for cluster head election. The proposed model uses five descriptors to determine the opportunity for each node to become a CH. These descriptors are: residual energy, location suitability, density, compacting, and distance from the base station. We use this fuzzy logic model in proposing the Fuzzy Logic-based Energy-Efficient Clustering for WSN based on minimum separation Distance enforcement between CHs (FL-EEC/D). Furthermore, we adopt the Gini index to measure the clustering algorithms’ energy efficiency in terms of their ability to balance the distribution of energy through WSN sensor nodes. We compare the proposed technique FL-EEC/D with a fuzzy logic-based CH election approach, a k-means based clustering technique, and LEACH. Simulation results show enhancements in energy efficiency in terms of network lifetime and energy consumption balancing between sensor nodes for different network sizes and topologies. Results show an average improvement in terms of first node dead and half nodes dead.

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Energy efficiency and sensing coverage are essential metrics for enhancing the lifetime and the utilization of wireless sensor networks. Many protocols have been developed to address these issues, among which, clustering is considered a key technique in minimizing the consumed energy. However, few clustering protocols address the sensing coverage metric. This paper proposes a general framework that addresses both metrics for clustering algorithms in wireless sensor networks. The proposed framework is based on applying the principles of Virtual Field Force on each cluster within the network in order to move the sensor nodes towards proper locations that maximize the sensing coverage and minimize the transmitted energy. Two types of virtual forces are used: an attractive force that moves the nodes towards the cluster head in order to reduce the energy used for communication and a repulsive force that moves the overlapping nodes away from each other such that their sensing coverage is maximized. The performance of the proposed mechanism was evaluated by applying it to the well-known LEACH clustering algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism improves the performance of the LEACH protocol considerably in terms of the achieved sensing coverage, and the network lifetime

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Image steganography has been widely adopted to protect confidential data. Researchers have been seeking to improve the steganographic techniques in order to increase the embedding capacity while preserving the stego-image quality. In this paper, we propose a steganography method using particle swarm optimization and chaos theory aiming at finding the best pixel locations in the cover image to hide the secret data while maintaining the quality of the resultant stego-image. To enhance the embedding capacity, the host and secret images are divided into blocks and each block stores an appropriate amount of secret bits. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing methods in terms of the PSNR and SSIM image quality metrics.