BPSO-SEP: a routing protocol based on binary particle swarm optimization

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) constitute the building block in many applications; their roles being to collect information, to carry out some basic processing on it and to transmit it to remote base stations. However, these elements face several constraints such as the volatile aspect of the radio links, the accessibility of the monitored environment, the limited energy of batteries, etc. Routing is one of the fundamental functions in wireless networks with the main objectives are the optimal management of the network energy and improving its reliability and latency. In this work, the probabilistic principle of the Stable Election Protocol (SEP) algorithm is replaced by the stochastic principle of the Binary Particle Swarm Optimisation (BPSO) algorithm to obtain the optimal cluster heads. The simulation results of the proposed BPSO-SEP protocol outperform those obtained by the Stable Election Protocol (SEP) and Threshold SEP (TSEP) regarding network lifetime, stability period, network scalability and number of packets delivered to the base station.