Summary
Nowadays, there is an emerging need for applications based on the Internet of Things (IoT). The sensor nodes present in the IoT network produce data constantly, which directly influences the durability of the network. Therefore, two major challenges while designing IoT systems are network lifetime and energy consumption. Although the ability of IoT applications is huge, there are several limitations such as energy optimization, heterogeneity of devices storage, load balancing, privacy, and security that have to be addressed. These constraints have to be optimized for improving the efficiency of the networks. Hence, the main intention of this paper is to develop the intelligent‐based cluster head selection model for accomplishing green communication in IoT. The two famous algorithms like spotted hyena optimization (SHO) and sun flower optimization (SFO) are integrated to form sun flower‐spotted hyena optimization (SF‐SHO) by utilizing the hybrid meta‐heuristic concept for the optimal cluster head selection. The most significant parameters in IoT networks like delay, distance, energy, temperature, and load are considered for deriving a multi‐objective function to offer optimal clustering. The cluster head of the model is optimally tuned based on the hybrid SF‐SHO, to solve the multi‐objective problem, thus showing the enhanced green communication performance. The proposed model is analyzed and evaluated over different approaches in terms of energy‐specific factors, and the attained results confirm the efficiency of the developed method.