Virtual force-based intelligent clustering for energy-efficient routing in mobile wireless sensor networks

A mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) consists of many sensor nodes, which can move from one position to another and gather data from the environment, and such nodes are coordinated with the support of a sink node. In recent years, the mobility behavior of sensor nodes present in wireless sensor networks is used to form effective clustering and to perform cluster-based routing. Virtual force is an important phenomenon in sensor nodes, which is used to model the mobility behavior. Production rules that use spatiotemporal constraints are able to make more accurate decisions on mobility speed, mobility area, and the required time. Routing in MWSNs under the mobility scenario will provide better performance if virtual force-based mobility modeling is used to form clusters. In this paper, an intelligent routing algorithm called virtual force-based intelligent clustering for energy-efficient routing in MWSNs has been proposed for effective and energy-efficient cluster-based routing of data packets collected by mobile sensor nodes in a MWSN. This algorithm uses attractive and repulsive forces for finding the cluster members. Moreover, spatiotemporal constraints are used in the form of rules for clustering, reclustering, and cluster head election and to perform routing through the cluster heads using intelligent rules. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm is that it increases the network lifetime and packet delivery ratio. Moreover, it reduces the delay and the energy consumption.