• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.1276-1295
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• 2023

Sensor networks are now an essential aspect of wireless communication, especially with the introduction of new gadgets and protocols. Their ability to be deployed anywhere, especially where human presence is undesirable, makes them perfect choices for remote observation and control. Despite their vast range of applications from home to hostile territory monitoring, limited battery power remains a limiting factor in their efficacy. To analyze and transmit data, it requires intelligent use of available battery power. Several studies have established effective routing algorithms based on clustering. However, choosing optimal cluster heads and similarity measures for clustering significantly increases computing time and cost. This work proposes and implements a simple two-phase technique of route creation and maintenance to ensure route reliability by employing nature-inspired ant colony optimization followed by the fuzzy decision engine (FDE). Benchmark methods such as PSO, ACO and GWO are compared with the proposed HRCM's performance. The objective has been focused towards establishing the superiority of proposed work amongst existing optimization methods in a standalone configuration. An average of 15% improvement in energy consumption followed by 12% improvement in latency reduction is observed in proposed hybrid model over standalone optimization methods.