TEO-MCRP: Thermal exchange optimization-based clustering routing protocol with a mobile sink for wireless sensor networks

Sensor nodes consume their energy quickly due to their continuous perception, routing, and internal circuit mechanisms in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Especially, the nodes that are close to the sink node consume their energy more quickly, causing the hot spot problem. In this direction, the development of robust clustering and adaptive mobile routing methods is extremely significant to ensure energy efficiency in WSNs. For this purpose, a new mobile clustering routing protocol based on Thermal Exchange Optimization (TEO) inspired by Newton's cooling law, called TEO-MCRP, is presented for heterogeneous WSNs. In the present protocol, two different algorithms are proposed for Cluster Head (CH) selection and Mobile Sink (MS) path detection with objective functions including independent fitness parameters. With the manner of minimizing these objective functions, effective CH selection and MS trajectory determination have been performed for each mobile round using the temperature equations in the TEO algorithm. In parallel, an MS node gathers data from all CHs and transmits all data to the Base Station (BS). The performance results strikingly illustrate that the proposed protocol is better than other algorithms. Due to minimizing packet conflicts and losses, the packet delivery rate was achieved at 99.784% in the network