Two-Tier Clustering with Routing Protocol for IoT Assisted WSN

In recent times, Internet of Things (IoT) has become a hot research topic and it aims at interlinking several sensor-enabled devices mainly for data gathering and tracking applications. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an important component in IoT paradigm since its inception and has become the most preferred platform to deploy several smart city application areas like home automation, smart buildings, intelligent transportation, disaster management, and other such IoT-based applications. Clustering methods are widely-employed energy efficient techniques with a primary purpose i.e., to balance the energy among sensor nodes. Clustering and routing processes are considered as Non-Polynomial (NP) hard problems whereas bio-inspired techniques have been employed for a known time to resolve such problems. The current research paper designs an Energy Efficient Two-Tier Clustering with Multi-hop Routing Protocol (EETTC-MRP) for IoT networks. The presented EETTC-MRP technique operates on different stages namely, tentative Cluster Head (CH) selection, final CH selection, and routing. In first stage of the proposed EETTC-MRP technique, a type II fuzzy logic-based tentative CH (T2FL-TCH) selection is used. Subsequently, Quantum Group Teaching Optimization Algorithm-based Final CH selection (QGTOA-FCH) technique is deployed to derive an optimum group of CHs in the network. Besides, Political Optimizer based Multihop Routing (PO-MHR) technique is also employed to derive an optimal selection of routes between CHs in the network. In order to validate the efficacy of EETTC-MRP method, a series of experiments was conducted and the outcomes were examined under distinct measures. The experimental analysis infers that the proposed EETTC-MRP technique is superior to other methods under different measures.