Abstract—Energy scarcity, spatial load imbalance, and hidden security overheads limit the scalability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), pressures that intensify in dense 6G deployments. It proposes EP-HCRO, a unified framework that predicts short horizon residual energy, performs hybrid clustering via a composite score that blends predicted energy, local QoS density, and harvesting potential, executes hybrid routing that switches between direct CH-to-sink and multi-hop CH-to-CH by minimizing a multi-objective path cost, and treats security as a tenable per-bit energy cost, enabling principled lifetime protection trade-offs. The model adopts the first-order radio-energy formulation and defines a reproducible evaluation plan (topologies, parameters, baselines, and metrics, and ablations) to compare against LEACH and improved variants. This paper presents the architectural design, mathematical formulation, and algorithmic workflow of EP-HCRO. It defines a reproducible evaluation methodology for assessing lifetime, fairness, and delivery performance against LEACH-family baselines. Full empirical validation and comparative simulation results are reserved for an extended version of this work. Keywords—6G-enabled wireless sensor networks (WSNs), Residual-energy prediction, Hybrid clustering and CH-to-sink/CH-to-CH routing, Security-as-energy-cost modelling, Energy-harvesting-aware optimization.
Mohammed et al. (Wed,) studied this question.