Energy‐efficient adaptive clustering (EEAC) with rendezvous nodes and mobile sink

Summary Wireless sensor networks are an indispensable part of the present industrial and environmental scenario, with the everlasting challenges to increase network lifetime and reduce energy consumption. This paper presents an energy‐efficient adaptive clustering (EEAC) model, which is built upon the existing Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol with mobile sink and rendezvous nodes. The nodes are energy aware and participate in cluster head selection only if their current energy is higher than the average energy for the round. The idle nodes in the rendezvous region, which do not act as rendezvous nodes undergo clustering within themselves for the efficient routing of data. The EEAC inspires local clustering successfully conserves the energy of continuous long‐range transmission and enhances network lifetime. The proposed scheme proves to be remarkably better than the previous schemes, especially in large network cross‐sections. It improves alive nodes' performance for around 50% more rounds than the optimizing‐LEACH and the remaining energy curves improve around 500 rounds for 250 mx250 m network. For 350 mx350 m and 450 mx450 m networks, the results improved much in EEAC. In addition, the improvement in stability period is 450%, 578%, and 198% for the network cross‐section 150 mx150 m, 200 mx200m, and 250 mx250 m, respectively. The proposed study is for the existing optimizing‐LEACH with mobile sink (MS) and rendezvous node (RN) model. The EEAC inspires local clustering successfully conserves the energy of continuous long‐range transmission and enhances network lifetime. The RNs setup in the optimizing‐LEACH model leaves idle nodes in the rendezvous region, which successively deplete their energy by direct communication with MS. This prevents the early death of these nodes, and the load among the local normal nodes (NNs) is balanced.