A Biologically Inspired Algorithm for Low Energy Clustering Problem in Body Area Network

The growing application of body area networks (BANs) in different fields makes the low energy clustering a paramount issue. A clustering optimization algorithm in BANs is a fundamental scheme to guarantee that the essential collected data can be forwarded in a reliable path and improve the lifetime of BANs. Low energy clustering is a technique, which provides a method that shows how to reduce network communication costs in BANs. A careful low energy clustering scheme is one of the most critical means in the research of BANs, which has attracted considerable attention, comprising monitoring capability constraints. However, the classical clustering method leads to high cost when constraints such as large overall energy consumption are undertaken. Hence, a binary immune hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm (BIHABCA), a randomized swarm intelligent scheme applied in BANs, motivated by immune theory and hybrid scheme is introduced. Furthermore, we designed the formulation that considers both distances between two nodes and the length of bits. Finally, we have compared the energy cost optimized by BIHABCA with a shuffled frog leaping algorithm, ant colony optimization, and simulated annealing in the simulation with different quantity of nodes in terms of energy cost. Results show that the energy cost of the network optimized by the proposed BIHABCA method decreased compared to those by the other three methods which mean that the proposed BIHABCA finds the global optima and reduces the energy cost of transmitting and receiving data in BANs.