Determination of the K-optimal number of chains-based routing protocol formed by the K-Means algorithm for the WSN

Wireless sensor networks comprise of a large number of lightweight and relatively low-cost computational nodes which their main task is to sense the surrounding environment and collect the information to send it wirelessly to a central point to take the appropriate actions. Although these networks had been used in various applications, achieving this task is challenging due to the many constraints of sensor nodes including their limited processing power, communication bandwidth, and power supply. Therefore, an energy efficient routing protocols had to be developed specifically for sensor networks to insure longer lifetime and reasonable performance of the network. In this work, we propose an energy efficient hierarchical routing protocol using chain-based clustering. By simulation on MATLAB, the proposed protocol proved to enhance the performance as it prolongs the lifetime of the network and decreases the energy consumption, the transmission delay, and the overhead compared to other existing protocols as it depends on some advanced methods including dynamic selection of number of chains method, k-means clustering method, advanced greedy chain construction method, and multi-factor based leader selection method.