Toward robust and energy-efficient clustering wireless sensor networks: A double-stage scale-free topology evolution model

Establishing a scale-free topology is widely regarded as one of the effective methods that can significantly improve the fault tolerance performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, the scale-free topology is very vulnerable to malicious attacks in which the nodes with high importance are attacked first, and its energy efficiency is also unsatisfactory. Therefore, how to build a comprehensively robust and energy-efficient WSN becomes a challenging issue. To address this issue, the paper proposes a Robust and Energy-efficient Scale-free double stage Topology evolution model (REST). In the first stage of REST, a scale-free backbone topology is built to achieve good fault tolerance, and in the second stage, the backbone topology is optimized using a memetic evolutionary algorithm to achieve good intrusion tolerance and energy efficiency. The topology constructed by REST is organized in a clustering manner, which is applicable to most task scenarios. Analytical and simulation results have demonstrated that REST can obtain a more satisfactory topological structure spending less time than existing algorithms.