Energy-efficient Multilevel Heterogeneous Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are being applied widely for data collection, especially to carry out the mission-critical tasks. Therefore, one of the most challenging tasks of mission-critical sensors and sensor networks is the development of energy efficient (EE) routing protocols. Comparing with flat routing protocols, more EE can be achieved in hierarchical routing protocols. In this paper, we propose an enhanced balanced energy efficient network-integrated super-heterogeneous (E-BEENISH) routing protocol, by analyzing communication energy consumption of the clusters and a large range of energy levels in heterogeneous WSNs. E-BEENISH is based on weighted election probabilities of each node to become a cluster head according to the remaining energy and the distance from the sink to the node. Moreover, we also study the impact of the heterogeneity of nodes in terms of energy. Studying the sensitivity of our stable election protocol, we conclude heterogeneity parameters capturing energy imbalance in the network and find that the E-BEENISH yields the longer stability region for the suitable weight of energy and distance. Our results show by simulation that the E-BEENISH can improve system lifetime by an order of magnitude compared to obtained using current clustering protocols, which is crucial for many applications.