Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) achieve much attention from various domains because of its easy maintenance, self-configuration, and scalability characteristics. It is comprised of small-sized sensors that interact with the Internet of Things (IoT) for observing and recording the physical conditions. The sensor nodes are autonomous and construct inter-communication topology with each other in an ad-hoc manner. However, the main restrictions of sensor nodes are their finite resources for energy management, data storage, transmission, and processing power. Different solutions have been addressed by researchers to overcome network performance due to bounded limitations of such battery-powered nodes, however, equalize the energy consumption and maintain the network throughput are the main research problems. Furthermore, due to the compromised nodes, the data is more prone to security vulnerabilities. Therefore, their security over the unpredictable network is other research concerns. Thus, the aim of this research article to propose a secure and energy-aware heuristic-based routing (SEHR) protocol for WSN to detect and prevent compromising data with efficient performance. Firstly, the proposed protocol makes use of an artificial intelligence-based heuristic analysis to accomplish a reliable, and intellectual learning scheme. Secondly, it protects the transmissions against adversary groups to attain security with the least complexity. Moreover, the route maintenance strategy is also achieved by using traffic exploration to reduce link failures and network dis-connectivity. The simulation results demonstrated the SEHR protocol improves the efficacy for network throughput by an average of 18%, packet drop ratio by 42%, end-to-end delay by 26%, energy consumption by 36%, faulty routes by 38%, network overhead by 44%, and computational overhead by 43% in dynamic scenarios as compared to existing work.