AbstractStable routing and energy conservation over a wireless sensor network (WSN) is a major issue in Internet of Things applications. The network lifetime can be increased when studying this issue with interest. Data transmission is a dominant factor in IoT networks for communication overhead and energy consumption. A proposed efficient node stable routing ($$ENSR$$
ENSR
) protocol is introduced to guarantee the stability of transmission data between the source and destination nodes, in a dynamic WSN conditions. $$ENSR$$
ENSR
minimizes energy consumption and selects more stable nodes for packets forwarding. Stability becomes the most important factor that qualifies the node's centrality. A node’s stability is characterized by residual energy, link quality, and number of hops needed to reach the destination from the node. To calculate node's stability, an enhanced centrality concept, known as stable betweenness centrality ($$SBC$$
SBC
) is introduced. In $$ENSR$$
ENSR
, at first, some nodes will be selected as the stable forwarding nodes, usually with maximum $$SBC$$
SBC
between their neighbors within a limited communication radio range of a particular region. Furthermore, each stable forwarding node then broadcasts its identity, including $$SBC$$
SBC
, to the source node separately. The source node can compute a stable path to forward packets to the corresponding stable forwarding node, based on a proper designed stable path routing metric ($$SPRM$$
SPRM
). Then, the stable forwarding node will behave as a new source node and start another stable path routing process until the packets are forwarded and reached to the destination node. In addition, the change of stable nodes over time balances and conserves node energy consumption, thereby mitigating “hot spots”. The proposed routing protocol is validated through simulation. The numerical results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing algorithms, global and local reliability-based routing ($$GLRR$$
GLRR
) and reliable energy-aware routing protocol $$(RER)$$
(
R
E
R
)
, in terms of network efficiency and reliability.
A Novel Optimal Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad hoc Network with the aid of Double Encryption Mechanism