A Survey on Cluster-Based Hybrid Nature-Inspired Routing Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has a lot of potential applications in many emerging technologies. Sensor technologies have become ubiquitous and improved human lives significantly. Sensors can be deployed in any environment and programmed to sense the surroundings, process and communicate the data for further analysis. As the advancement of WSN grows, on the other side challenges and open research areas also grow proportionally. As sensors are energy constraint devices, many research works focus on energy conservation in all aspects of routing, clustering, data aggregation, and coverage area and sensor localization. With comparison with all functionalities, routing consumes considerable amount energy, which paved way for designing novel and hybrid routing algorithm in addition to traditional methods. Cluster formation is vital in routing and data aggregation process. The sensor node with maximum remaining energy, proximity to sink, reach ability from maximum number of nodes is opted as cluster head. This report reviewed the main techniques in recently developed hybrid algorithms for routing that are emerged as an inspiration of natural habitats and applied in cluster-based scenario. The approach of combining various successful nature-inspired algorithms shows desirable results. The performance of hybrid algorithms was comparatively analyzed.