BioWSN: A Bio-Inspired Method for Optimization of Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been recently gaining traction for many applications in monitoring and surveillance systems in the physical world specifically in agriculture, healthcare, and smart cities. Many clustering and routing approaches have been introduced to reduce the consumption of energy in WSNs to increase the lifetime of the network. In this study, we propose an improved version of grey wolf optimizer (GWO), a nature-inspired metaheuristic optimization algorithm, to perform cluster head selection and routing in WSN while maximizing the lifetime of WSN. GWO has a propensity to converge to local optima. To overcome this drawback of the conventional GWO, we introduce a balancing factor between the exploration and exploitation phases of the algorithm in addition to a mapping scheme. Comparative simulation and analysis of the proposed algorithm show significant improvement compared to frequently used and well-known approaches namely LEACH and PSO.