Summary
One of the famous approaches to decision making is named as multicriteria decision making (MCDM). In order to solve the MCDM issues, a better way is provided by the fuzzy logic. Expendability, cost, maintenance, availability of software, and performance characteristics are such problems considered by the decision. The precise estimation of the pertinent data is one of the vital phases in DM systems. This paper presents a fuzzy MCDM‐based cluster head (CH) selection and hybrid routing protocol to solve the most common issues. In this research article, the generalized intuitionistic fuzzy soft set (GIFSS) approach is utilized to select the optimal CH, and hybrid shark smell optimization (SSO), and a genetic algorithm (GA) is introduced for the effective routing. Initially, the wireless sensor network (WSN) system and energy models are designed, and then the nodes are grouped into several clusters. Next, based on the GIFSS, the CH nodes are selected, and finally, an effective routing is placed based on the hybrid optimizations. The implementation is performed on the NS2 platform, and the performances are evaluated by packet delivery ratio (PDR), delay, packet loss ratio (PLR), network lifetime, bit error rate (BER), energy consumption, throughput, and jitter. The existing approaches named energy centers examining using particle swarm optimization (EC‐PSO), variable dimension‐based PSO (VD‐PSO), energy‐efficient PSO‐based CH selection (PSO‐ECHS), low‐energy adaptive clustering hierarchy‐sugeno fuzzy (LEACH‐SF), SSO, and GA are compared with the proposed strategy. According to the implemented outcomes, it displays the proposed strategy and gives improved outcomes than the others.