Designing a wireless sensor network (WSN) energy-aware routing protocol is a
thought-provoking mission. Thus, this article presents an energy-saving routing protocol
for WSNs. The proposed protocol considers the energy level of sensor nodes and
the distance to the base station to optimally determine the best route. It also takes
advantage of the inherent complementarity of clustering techniques. The proposed
routing scheme also exploits data aggregation to improve energy utilization and reduce
communication costs. To choose the flawless route between a source node and the
base station, ant colony optimization and A* algorithms are integrated. Finally, the performance
of the proposed routing technique is compared with those of other existing
up-to-date protocols. The results show that the proposed routing protocol outperforms
them in terms of total energy consumption, network lifetime, stability period,
and goodput.