WOATCA: A secure and energy aware scheme based on whale optimisation in clustered wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Clustering is an important method for extending the network life of each node in wireless sensor networks. Owing to the untrustworthy environment, these nodes unintentionally sacrifice their energy and lost their life which is a major challenge and requires appropriate attention for smooth communication. Thus energy efficiency and network life period both are major concerns in critical and sensitive real-life applications such as military applications, landslide monitoring etc. This study reviews and analyses existing trust-based clustering routing protocols for a complete understanding of research contribution to date made by researchers of this domain. In addition, a novel trust-based energy efficient protocol based on a Whale Optimisation Algorithm named WOATCA has been presented. This algorithm focuses on the selection of trust worthy nodes as cluster heads (CHs) by considering five parameters namely (i) node's residual energy, (ii) number of packets forwarded by a node, (iii) average cluster distance, (iv) transmission delay, and (v) node density. Simulation results and analysis demonstrate that WOATCA outperformed existing protocols by showing a percentage decrease of 87.85, 64.58 and 61.36% in the selection of compromised nodes as CH in comparison with existing trust-based schemes such as Adoptive LEACH Mobile (ALM), Topology Control Algorithm for node mobility (TCM), Q12 and secure CH selection protocols, respectively.