Clustering is an efficient topology control method which balances the traffic load of the sensor nodes and improves the overall scalability and the life time of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, in a cluster based WSN, the cluster heads (CHs) consume more energy due to extra work load of receiving the sensed data, data aggregation and transmission of aggregated data to the base station. Moreover, improper formation of clusters can make some CHs overloaded with high number of sensor nodes. This overload may lead to quick death of the CHs and thus partitions the network and thereby degrade the overall performance of the WSN. It is worthwhile to note that the computational complexity of finding optimum cluster for a large scale WSN is very high by a brute force approach. In this paper, we propose a novel differential evolution (DE) based clustering algorithm for WSNs to prolong lifetime of the network by preventing faster death of the highly loaded CHs. We incorporate a local improvement phase to the traditional DE for faster convergence and better performance of our proposed algorithm. We perform extensive simulation of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. 
A novel differential evolution based clustering algorithm for wireless sensor networks