Published Paper Details:

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming an increasingly important and challenging research area. Advances in WSN technology enable a wide range of applications, including environmental monitoring and object tracking systems. WSNs consist of small, low-cost sensor nodes with limited transmission ranges, processing power, storage capacity, and energy resources. This study focuses on energy-constrained WSNs deployed over a specific region, where the primary task is to collect data from sensor nodes and transmit it to a base station for further processing. Each bit of data requires a fixed amount of energy to receive and an additional amount to transmit, which varies with the transmission range. If all nodes were to transmit directly to the base station, they would rapidly exhaust their energy reserves. Efficient routing in WSNs, given their constraints on power, energy, and storage, poses a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a Particle Swarm Optimization-based Routing protocol (PSOR) that prioritizes energy efficiency in routing and optimizes data forwarding paths to the base node. The PSOR algorithm generates optimized routing paths by using energy consumption as a fitness value to select the best path. Our novel strategy enhances route optimization by integrating the Breadth First Search algorithm with PSOR to achieve more energy-efficient and shorter paths. Effectiveness of the proposed method was evidenced by experimental results obtained through the NS2 (Network Simulator 2) tool.