A Two-Stage RPSO-ACS Based Protocol: A New Method for Sensor Network Clustering and Routing in Mobile Computing

In the field of mobile computing, after the placement of sensor nodes, energy efficiency of data transmission in the sensor network is becoming a critical issue as the sensor nodes are battery-operated devices. Most of the proposed protocols implement clustering based methods in order to balance the energy consumption among the sensor nodes through data aggregation. In this paper, a new method named a two-stage RPSO-ACS based protocol is proposed to improve the energy efficiency and network operation quality in the data transmission process, prolonging the lifespan of the network. Firstly, in the process of cluster head (CH) selection, the resampling particle swarm optimization (RPSO) is introduced, which shows better precision and efficiency than particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA). Secondly, after the selection of cluster head, instead of the single-hop transmission from the cluster heads to base station (BS), which is used in many papers, we adopt multi-hop transmission to save energy. The ant colony optimization (ACO) is used to select the relay nodes between the cluster heads and the base station for the purpose of minimizing the energy consumption in the transmission process. In addition, we determine the reasonable threshold based on the energy consumption curve of the transmission. In this way, the nodes within a radius of the threshold from BS communicate with BS directly to save energy. Experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve the goal of improving the energy efficiency and operation quality of the sensor network in comparison to traditional methods.