EP-HCRO: Energy-Predicted Hybrid Clustering & Routing with Tunable Security for 6G-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract—Energy scarcity, spatial load imbalance, and hidden security overheads limit the scalability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), pressures that intensify in dense 6G deployments. It proposes EP-HCRO, a unified framework that predicts short horizon residual energy, performs hybrid clustering via a composite score that blends predicted energy, local QoS density, and harvesting potential, executes hybrid routing that switches between direct CH-to-sink and multi-hop CH-to-CH by minimizing a multi-objective path cost, and treats security as a tenable per-bit energy cost, enabling principled lifetime protection trade-offs. The model adopts the first-order radio-energy formulation and defines a reproducible evaluation plan (topologies, parameters, baselines, and metrics, and ablations) to compare against LEACH and improved variants. This paper presents the architectural design, mathematical formulation, and algorithmic workflow of EP-HCRO. It defines a reproducible evaluation methodology for assessing lifetime, fairness, and delivery performance against LEACH-family baselines. Full empirical validation and comparative simulation results are reserved for an extended version of this work. Keywords—6G-enabled wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Residual-energy prediction, Hybrid clustering and CH-to-sink/CH-to-CH routing, Security-as-energy-cost modelling, Energy-harvesting-aware optimization.