An Energy-Efficient Evolutionary Clustering Technique for Disaster Management in IoT Networks.

Morteza Biabani,Nasser Yazdani,Hossein Fotouhi

doi:10.3390/s20092647

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are key elements of Internet of Things (IoT) networks which provide sensing and wireless connectivity. Disaster management in smart cities is classified as a safety-critical application. Thus, it is important to ensure system availability by increasing the lifetime of WSNs. Clustering is one of the routing techniques that benefits energy efficiency in WSNs. This paper provides an evolutionary clustering and routing method which is capable of managing the energy consumption of nodes while considering the characteristics of a disaster area. The proposed method consists of two phases. First, we present a model with improved hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) for cluster head (CH) selection. Second, we design a PSO-based multi-hop routing system with enhanced tree encoding and a modified data packet format. The simulation results for disaster scenarios prove the efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the overall residual energy, number of live nodes, network coverage, and the packet delivery ratio.

Highlights

The Internet of Things (IoT) includes a large number of distributed nodes which are capable of sensing and interacting remotely [1,2]
Energy-efficient cluster head selection and routing methods based on evolutionary algorithms were proposed for safety-critical Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications, focusing on forest fire
To select relay nodes (RNs) with a fitness function including energy-efficiency and communication link quality, which resulted in the development of a modified tree encoding method based on a new data packet format

Summary

Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) includes a large number of distributed nodes which are capable of sensing and interacting remotely [1,2]. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are classified as the major players of IoT networks and provide a wireless connection between constrained devices. Sensor devices have very limited battery power, requiring the design of energy efficient algorithms [2,5]. Limitations in energy resources have a direct impact on the application performance, as sensors with depleted batteries can cause network disconnections and packet losses [6,7,8,9]. In a multi-hop sensor network, it is crucial to devise algorithms and mechanisms in such a way to select the optimal route for data transfer to reduce energy consumption [2,5,10,11]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion