# GSHFA-HCP: a novel intelligent high-performance clustering protocol for agricultural IoT in fragrant pear production monitoring

## TL;DR

This paper introduces GSHFA-HCP, a new clustering protocol for agricultural IoT that improves energy efficiency and reduces delays in monitoring fragrant pear production.

## Contribution

The novel GSHFA-HCP protocol combines Gaussian mutation and sine cosine firefly algorithm for optimized clustering in agricultural wireless sensor networks.

## Key findings

- GSHFA-HCP reduces network energy consumption and extends network lifespan significantly.
- The protocol outperforms existing methods with 63.69% improvement in network lifespan and 35.78% reduction in packet loss rate.
- It achieves lower transmission delay and higher throughput compared to other clustering protocols.

## Abstract

The agriculture Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely applied in assisting pear farmers with pest and disease prediction, as well as precise crop management, by providing real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities. To enhance the effectiveness of agriculture IoT monitoring applications, clustering protocols are utilized in the data transmission of agricultural wireless sensor networks (AWSNs). However, the selection of cluster heads is a NP-hard problem, which cannot be solved effectively by conventional algorithms. Based on this, This paper proposes a novel AWSNs clustering model that comprehensively considers multiple factors, including node energy, node degree, average distance and delay. Furthermore, a novel high-performance cluster protocol based on Gaussian mutation and sine cosine firefly algorithm (GSHFA-HCP) is proposed to meet the practical requirements of different scenarios. The innovative Gaussian mutation strategy and sine–cosine hybrid strategy are introduced to optimize the clustering scheme effectively. Additionally, an efficient inter-cluster data transmission mechanism is designed based on distance between nodes, residual energy, and load. The experimental results show that compared with other four popular schemes, the proposed GSHFA-HCP protocol has significant performance improvement in reducing network energy consumption, extending network life and reducing transmission delay. In comparison with other protocols, GSHFA-HCP achieves optimization rates of 63.69%, 17.2%, 19.56%, and 35.78% for network lifespan, throughput, transmission delay, and packet loss rate, respectively.