Double firefly based efficient clustering for large-scale wireless sensor networks

Clustering is one of the most important approaches used to extend the lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The fundamental metric taken by clustering algorithms is energy enhancement. Moreover, network coverage and load balance are two important approaches that play crucial roles in improving network lifetime and delivery since the former focuses on maximizing the use of all network resources, while the second is based on distributing the load between the nodes to enhance the energy consumption. As the challenge of clustering nodes in an energy-efficient way is an NP-Hard problem, firefly optimization algorithm is used to address this challenge. However, the proposed solutions focus on centralized processing of the algorithm, which makes them unsuitable for large-scale WSN. In this paper, a double firefly based efficient clustering solution is proposed for large-scale WSN which is implemented in a decentralized fashion to improve the lifetime and packet delivery. The first firefly algorithm is used by each node to move to the best initial Cluster Head (CH) by performing a balance of belonging between the clusters, while the second algorithm is used only between the initial CHs to eliminate membership redundancy and optimally construct balanced clusters. The simulation results show that our proposed solution significantly improves the network lifetime as well as the delivery rate.