For the past 20 years, many authors have focused their investigations on wireless sensor networks. Various issues related to wireless sensor networks such as energy minimization (optimization), compression schemes, self-organizing network algorithms, routing protocols, quality of service management, security, energy harvesting, etc., have been extensively explored. The three most important issues among these are energy efficiency, quality of service and security management. To get the best possible results in one or more of these issues in wireless sensor networks optimization is necessary. Furthermore, in number of applications (e.g., body area sensor networks, vehicular ad hoc networks) these issues might conflict and require a trade-off amongst them. Due to the high energy consumption and data processing requirements, the use of classical algorithms has historically been disregarded. In this context contemporary researchers started using bio-mimetic strategy-based optimization techniques in the field of wireless sensor networks. These techniques are diverse and involve many different optimization algorithms. As far as we know, most existing works tend to focus only on optimization of one specific issue of the three mentioned above. It is high time that these individual efforts are put into perspective and a more holistic view is taken. In this paper we take a step in that direction by presenting a survey of the literature in the area of wireless sensor network optimization concentrating especially on the three most widely used bio-mimetic algorithms, namely, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization and genetic algorithm. In addition, to stimulate new research and development interests in this field, open research issues, challenges and future research directions are highlighted.

Securing the Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) along with appropriate protection of the privacy of drivers or vehicle owners is a very challenging task. Drivers' behavioral tendencies can be reflected in the mobility patterns of the vehicles (rational behavior). Misbehaving vehicles are always threat to safety, VANETs security and privacy. Detection of misbehavior can enhance security and privacy in VANETs. This paper is presenting a mobility pattern based misbehavior detection approach in VANETs. Simulation results show that the Location Anonymous Message based proposed approach has the potential to improve security and maintain privacy in VANETs.

Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Network (RPL) with IPv6 support is the de facto standard for routing over Low-power and Lossy Network (LLN) called Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Objective Functions namely Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function (MRHOF) and Objective Function Zero (OF0) together with the Internet Control Messaging Protocol (ICMP) control messages, propel RPL to constructs routing paths called Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG), for packet routing within the sensor network. To the best knowledge of the authors, no detailed investigation has been carried out to unravel the dynamics of how these control messages impact on the network with respect to DODAG formation right before convergence is attained, particularly from the perspective of MRHOF and OF0. In this paper, the authors investigated the various types of control messages (DODAG Information Solicitation, DODAG Information Object and Destination Advertisement Object) used to setup the DODAG. RPL Simulations was carried out on one 100 nodes, starting with 10 nodes and incremented by 10 until the 100th node. Each simulation was repeated five times with a confidence level of 95%, which statistically signifies a reliable and acceptable confidence interval, for a duration of thirty minutes. Results obtained showed that the DIS–OF0 generated the least packets with 125 packets, followed by DAO–MRHOF with 1357 packets and the most generated; DIO–MRHOF with 1536 packets. Subsequently, MRHOF had higher Convergence Time of 130.67 seconds as to 87.93 seconds for OF0. This information is valuable for both the academia and industry.

Because of the nature of wireless channels, Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are vulnerable against many threats and attacks. Beside of this, the mobility of the network nodes made the security of routing protocols one of the most interesting research areas over Ad-Hoc networks. Moreover, Rushing attack became one of the common attacks against routing protocols in MANETs. Although there are many researches over Rushing attacks, the security research community suffers from a famine of evidence to present the exact position of this kind of attacks in MANETs clearly. Therefore, we paid particular attention to this issue to clarify the position of Rushing attacks against routing protocols and the functionality of this category of attacks. We hope that our document be useful for other researchers in understanding mentioned issue in face with this class of attacks.

Wireless sensor network (WSN) cluster‐based architecture is a system designed to control and monitor specific events or phenomena remotely, and one of the important concerns that need quick attention is security risks such as an intrusion in WSN traffic. At the same time, a high‐level security method may refer to an intrusion detection system|intrusion detection systems (IDS), which may be employed effectively to achieve a higher level of security in detecting an intruder attack or any attack initiated within a WSN system. The significance of the detection of network intrusions on heterogeneous cluster‐based sensor networks with wireless connections, as well as the approaches to machine learning utilised in IDS model development, were discussed. In addition, this research conducted several comparative studies of feature selection techniques and machine learning methodologies in the development of intrusion detection systems. The authors used a bibliometric indicator to identify the leading trends when it comes to IDS, and the VOS viewer was used to create a spatial mapping of co‐authorship, co‐occurrence, and citation types of analysis with their respective units of study. The purpose of this research paper is to generate relevant findings and a research problem formulation that can lead to a research gap in the research topic's domain area.