Enhancing VANET Energy Efficiency with Gorilla Troops Optimization-Based Clustering and Routing: EACR-GTO

The mobile ad-hoc network, which is a component The Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a wireless communication system that provides applications for navigation, safety, traffic management, and other areas with high-quality services. Because car sensors have a limited battery life, one of the main issues with VANETs is ensuring energy efficiency. To tackle this issue, we propose the Energy Aware Clustering and Routing (EACR) method using Gorilla Troops Optimization (GTO) to improve energy efficiency in VANETs. Initially, optimal Relay Nodes (RNs) are identified by optimizing the GTO based on factors such as residual energy, distances between sensors, distance between RNs and the Base Station (BS), node degree, and node centrality. Subsequently, energy and distance parameters are used to optimize multi-path routing with GTO. Additionally, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) ensures efficient node scheduling during the transmission phase. As a result, EACR-GTO effectively minimizes energy expenditure, extending the network lifespan while ensuring reliable data delivery in VANETs. Experimental results show that EACR-GTO achieves improvements in Packet Delivery Ratio (3.33 %, 2.20%, 1.09%), energy efficiency (9.09%, 5.66%, 3.85%), throughput (5.26%, 2.56%, 1.01%), end-to-end delay reduction (7.69 %, 4%, 1.64 %), and a decrease in cluster packet overhead (11.76%, 6.25%, 3.23%) when compared to existing methods such as Multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO), Comprehensive Learning Particle Swarm Optimization (CL-PSO), and the Multi-objective Firefly approach.