Secure and Energy-Based STEERA Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), the multifunctional low-power sensor nodes are linked to base stations and are highly responsible for sensing various information. However, maintaining the network's lifespan is a major issue because of limited battery capacity and node failures. Thus, the proposed study introduced a new Scalable Trust-based Energy Efficient Routing Algorithm (STEERA) with Adaptive Grasshopper Algorithm (AGA) to enhance the network lifespan. At first, the trust values (Tv) are generated for each node to eliminate the malicious node with the help of penalty factor and volatilization. To make efficient routing process, the nodes are formed into cluster groups. A suitable cluster head is selected for each cluster to mitigate the energy consumption problem through the AGA approach by optimizing the parameters like Tv, distance and residual energy. Finally, the data packets are effectively transmitted through a multi-hop routing process by selecting an appropriate path and satisfying certain parameters through Fire Hawks Optimization (FHO). To simulate the proposed techniques, NS2 software is employed, and the performance is measured over various metrics like energy consumption, residual energy, the lifespan of a network, packet loss ratio and average end-to-end delay. The performance analysis shows that the proposed protocol design has obtained higher results than conventional routing protocols.