A Framework for Wireless Sensor Network Optimization Using Fuzzy-Based Fractal Clustering to Enhance Energy Efficiency.

Wireless sensor networks' energy consumption is the major challenge to be handled. Clustering is one of the techniques majorly used for reducing energy consumption. During the course of time, many methodologies are being proposed and the existing ones are hybrid. Still, the energy can be reduced more. The scope of optimization is always there. Existing approaches either reduce energy consumption or work on routing or only on data gathering capabilities. But the technique proposed increases the lifetime of the wireless sensor network (WSN) by reducing energy consumption and improves routing efficiency. This paper proposes an approach based upon Fractal Clustering to improve the lifetime of the sensor nodes. The proposed approach named Enhanced Energy Efficient Fuzzy-based Fractal Clustering (EEFFC) algorithm optimizes the performance of WSN. First, fractal clustering is used on sensor nodes to find the location of the sensors. Then, a fuzzy inference system (FIS) is applied to results produced by fractal clustering. Applying FIS on cluster heads generated will optimize the results. As a result, the cost of data transmission will reduce, and hence, the lifetime of the network will improve. FIS generates multi-level clustering, which will result in a better routing path for sensor nodes. Hence, routing will also be improved. MATLAB 2020 is the simulation tool. The results of the simulation depict that EEFFC shows optimized results and it works better than LEACH, LEACH-SF, TEEN and DEEC. The energy consumption is being reduced by reducing the listening time of a node and by reducing the communication distance, for which clustering is optimized. The energy consumption has been reduced by 2% as compared to the algorithms it is compared with. Also, the node's time of death has been delayed by 3% in total. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]