Clone Chaotic Parallel Evolutionary Algorithm for Low-Energy Clustering in High-Density Wireless Sensor Networks

Because the sensors are constrained in energy capabilities, low-energy clustering has become a challenging problem in high-density wireless sensor networks (HDWSNs). Usually, sensor nodes tend to be tiny devices along with constrained clustering abilities. To have a low communication energy consumption, a low-energy clustering scheme should be designed properly. In this work, a new cloned chaotic parallel evolution algorithm (CCPEA) is proposed, and a low-energy clustering model is established to lower the communication energy consumption of HDWSNs. By introducing CCPEA into the low-energy clustering, an objective function is designed for evaluating the communication energy consumption. For this problem, we define a clone operator to minimize the communication energy consumption of HDWSNs, use the chaotic operator to randomly generate the initial population to expand the search range to avoid local optimization, and find the parallel operator to speed up the convergence speed. In the experiment, the effect of CCPEA is compared to heuristic approaches of particle swarm optimization (PSO) and simulated annealing (SA) for the HDWSNs with different numbers of sensors. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the presented CCPEA method achieves a lower communication energy consumption and faster convergence speed than PSO and SA.