RESEARCH PAPER DCTP Architecture for Data-Centric Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks Venkataramanan Chakrapani 1 • Senthil Kumar Babu 2 Received: 18 January 2021 / Accepted: 5 July 2021 / Published online: 23 July 2021 Ó Shiraz University 2021 Abstract Implementing reliable end-to-end transmission and reduced congestion in a single transport layer protocol is a critical issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These issues degrade the performance of the WSN; since the devices used to conﬁgure the networks are resource-constrained ones. If the protocol manages without any one of the above-said problems which will not be a complete solution for transport layer issues in WSN. Some of the data-centric applications of WSNs need the reliable transmission of data packets with reduced congestion. To addresses the same, this paper proposed the data-centric transport layer protocol (DCTP). It effectively addresses problems like reliable delivery and congestion-free transmission. One of the major problems of WSNs is cluster head (CH) election and channel assignment to the members of CH. In this paper, the modiﬁed black widow optimization is used to select the CH which leads to reduced congestion and balanced energy utilization among the nodes. In a separate phase, the reliability of the event-to-sink transmission has also been addressed. Hence this proposed DCTP will be ultimately suitable for the data-centric applications of WSNs and ensures reliability and energy efﬁciency (i.e., 6.2315 mJ and 7.825 mJ) in the case of varying data rate and the number of nodes. Keywords Cluster head election  Energy reduction  Reliability  RSSI  Wireless sensor networks 1 Introduction WSNs are a type of wireless networks in which the nodes are used to sense, interpret and transmit the information from the physical area to the base station. The autonomous devices in the networks are spatially deployed; it will collect and convey the information from the area of interest by self-conﬁguring nature (Sunil Kumar and Shiva Shankar 2020). Due to this intelligence behavior of these sensors, it can be widely utilized in different applications like surveillance, disaster monitoring, emergency and rescue operations, health care, environment and habitat monitor- ing, smart home, chemical industries, target tracking and so on. After the deployment of WSNs, it employs different types of issues like utilization of energy, reliability, con- gestion and group management (Salim et al. 2014). These issues are engaged with one or multiple layers of the open systems interconnection (OSI) model from the physical layer to application layer, and it is solved by attaining the solutions from the separate layer or cross-layer approaches. Because one of the issues of WSNs is congestion control, it can be separately solved with the help of transport layer protocol structures, but the issue like energy utilization can be solved with the physical layer, medium access control (MAC), network layer and so on. The data centric appli- cations of WSN need reduced congestion, reliability in transmission as well as efﬁcient energy utilization (Sri- vastava et al. 2020). This in turn, the researcher’s attention will be focused on transport layer solutions. The main objective of transport layer is to ensure the reliable transmission of data packets and minimize or to remove the network congestions owing to heavy trafﬁc in & Venkataramanan Chakrapani venkataramanan.c@hotmail.com Senthil Kumar Babu senb2002@gmail.com 1 Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Vivekanandha College of Technology for Women, Tiruchengode 637205, India 2 Centre for Communications and Signal Processing, Sree Vidyanikethan Engineering College, Tirupathi 517 012, India 123 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2021) 45:1203–1215 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40998-021-00448-3