Energy harvesting‐enabled energy‐efficient routing using spotted hyena optimization in wireless sensor network

Abstract

SummaryWith the continuous proliferation of sensing technology, it has become possible to utilize energy harvesting (EH)‐enabled sensor nodes for a variety of applications. However, conventional wireless sensor networks (WSNs), that is, those without EH‐enabled nodes, still have limited applicability due to their limited battery resources. Further, the utilization of EH‐enabled nodes in the network not only imposes a financial burden on the user but also limits its performance due to its dependence on environmental conditions. To address this concern, in this paper, we propose the EH‐enabled energy‐efficient routing (EHEER) technique for green communication in WSN. The predominant concern being addressed in this paper is the selection of cluster head (CH), which helps in gathering, aggregating and forwarding the data from the cluster‐based routing paradigm. We use the spotted hyena optimizer (SHO) algorithm for optimizing the fitness parameters for CH selection, namely, energy ratio, distance considerations, node density, load balancing and the network's average energy. We use EH‐enabled nodes in the network strategically so as to keep control over the costs incurred in the network. The simulation outcomes empirically prove the efficacy of the proposed work, as it effectively increases the network stability and operational period by a huge margin as compared to the existing techniques.