The design of cluster-based routing protocols is necessary for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). But, due to the lack of features, the traditional methods face issues, especially on unbalanced energy consumption of routing protocol. This work focuses on enhancing the security and energy efficiency of the system by proposing Energy Efficient Based Secure Routing Protocol (EESRP) which integrates trust management, optimization algorithm and key management. Initially, the locations of the deployed

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... des are calculated along with their trust values. Here, packet transfer is maintained securely by compiling a Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) approach. Finally, trust, key, location and energy parameters are incorporated in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and meta-heuristic based Harmony Search (HS) method to find the secure shortest path. Our results show that the energy consumption of the proposed approach is 1.06mJ during the transmission mode, and 8.69 mJ during the receive mode which is lower than the existing approaches. The average throughput and the average PDR for the attacks are also high with 72 and 62.5 respectively. The significance of the research is its ability to improve the performance metrics of existing work by combining the advantages of different approaches. After simulating the model, the results have been validated with conventional methods with respect to the number of live nodes, energy efficiency, network lifetime, packet loss rate, scalability, and energy consumption of routing protocol.