Social spider-based unequal clustering protocol for wireless sensor environment for smart cities

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks involve a massive number of sensor nodes often deployed to observe the physical world. Energy efficiency is the challenging issue in the design of WSN. For attaining energy efficient characteristic, clustering techniques has been employed. But, it suffers from hot spot issue which defines that the cluster heads (CHs) closet to base station are burdened with more traffic compared to CHs located far away from BS due to multihop communication. To resolving this, we present a social spider-based unequal clustering protocol (SSUCP) for WSN. SSUCP is based on the nature of social spiders to select the proper CHs and cluster size. Based on the fitness functions and node parameters, the interested decision of selecting the proper CHs and cluster size were made. The SSUCP is implemented in MATLAB and an extensive experimentation takes place under three situations based on distance to BS for ensuring the consistent results of the proposed method. In addition, the SSUCP is validated in terms of energy efficiency and network lifetime analysis. The attained experimental outcome verified that the SSUCP is the superior one over the compared methods.