Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of sensor nodes that work together to monitor and control their immediate surroundings. However, such a network needs to contend with frequent topological changes, and constrained communication, memory, and energy resources. For effective and seamless operation of WSN, the nodes must be driven by a sustainable solar energy source, resulting in a Solar Energy Wireless Sensor Network (SE-WSN). This research work has therefore developed a routing protocol for SE-WSN to find the optimal link between the source and destination using the Linear Function Mayfly Algorithm (LFMA). The developed technique was simulated in a MATLAB environment. The result of the study was compared with Fractional Firefly Chicken Swarm Optimization (FF-CO) and Particle Swarm Optimization Routing Protocol (PSO-RP) using end-to-end delay and energy consumption as performance metrics. For end-to-end delay, our technique recorded 0.62 ms, FF-CO has 0.70 ms while PSO-RP recorded 0.72 ms at 50 intermediate nodes. For the energy consumption, at 30 nodes, this study result showed 0.2 J/sec of energy consumed; FF-CO and PSORP showed 0.4 and 0.8 J/sec respectively. From the result analysis, it is therefore evident that the LFMA routing technique as proposed in this work has demonstrated a better performance.