Finding cluster head (CH) is an important issue in WSN. A new optimization algorithm Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) has been introduced recently, inspired by socio-political process of imperialistic competition. We use ICA for CH selection according to the communication energy (CE) cost. We demonstrate that ICA is an effective method for selection of CH in WSN. ICA either finds one or at most a few CHs within 500 decades. The tie is broken by use of a heuristic. CE stabilizes after 225 decades in the case of 300-size, after 150 decades for 200-size, and after 140 decades for 100-size WSNs. For 100-size, 1 CH is selected after 260 decades, for 200-size and 300-size 7 and 21 CHs, respectively are selected after 500 decades. For reducing the number of final CHs, the algorithm should be run for more than 500 decades for larger-size WSNs. For smaller size (100) networks, time increases very slowly with decades. For higher size networks, it increases nonlinearly and takes almost exponential shape with a network of 300 sensors. This is a preliminary study and we plan further investigation in this direction.

1. I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E. Cayirci, “A survey on sensor networks”, IEEE Communications Magazine 40 (8), pp 104 –112, 2002.
2. Estrin D., Govindan R., Heidemann J., Kumar S., Next century challenges: Scalable coordination in sensor networks. In Proceedings of the ACM Mobicom, pp 263–270, 1999.
3. I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E. Cayirci, “Wireless sensor networks: a survey”, Computer Networks 38, Elsevier, pp 393-422, 2002.
4. Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Networking Wireless Sensors, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
5. Ian F. Akyildiz, Ismail H. Kasimoglu, “Wireless sensor and actor networks: research challenges”, Ad Hoc Networks 2, Elsevier, pp 351-367, 2004.
6. Paolo Santi, “Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks”, ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 37, No. 2, pp 164–194, 2005.
7. W. R. Heinzelman, A. Chandrakasan, and H. Balakrishnan, “Energy efficient communication protocol for wireless micro-sensor networks”, Proc. of the 33rd ICSS, 2000.
8. Jun Zheng, Abbas Jamalipour, Wireless Sensor Networks: A Networking Perspective, John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
9. A. Khosrozadeh, H. Motameni, “Survey in Stable Coverage Guarded for Wireless Sensor Network”, American Journal of Scientific Research, Issue 22, pp 6-17, 2011.
10. W. Heinzelman, A. Chandrakasa, and H. Balakrishnan, "Energy Efficient Communication Protocols for Wireless Microsensor Networks", Proceedings of Hawaian International Conference on Systems Science, Jan. 2000.
11. C. Nam, H. Jeong, and D. Shin, “The Adaptive Cluster Head Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks", IEEE International Workshop on Semantic Computing and Application, pp 147-149, July 2008.
12. C. Nam, Y. Ku, J. Yoon, and D. Shin, "Cluster Head Selection for Equal Cluster Size in Wireless Sensor Networks", in Proc. IEEE New Trends in Information and Service Science, NISS, pp 618-623, July 2009.
13. Atashpaz-Gargari E., Lucas C., “Imperialist Competitive Algorithm: An algorithm for optimization inspired by imperialistic competition”, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 7, pp 4661–4666, 2007.
14. R. L. Haupt and S. E. Haupt, Practical Genetic Algorithms, Second Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2004.
15. M. Melanie, An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, MIT Press, 1999.
16. M. Dorigo and C. Blum, “Ant colony optimization theory: A survey”, Theoretical Computer Science, 344, pp 243 – 278, 2005.

WSN Cluster Head Imperialist