Energy efficient hybrid clustering protocol for multilevel heterogeneous wireless sensor network

In recent years, Because of rapid advancement of semiconductor fabrication technology, electronic devices have been becoming smaller, cheaper, and requiring less power for its operation every year. One of the fields, which have benefited by the technological advancement, is the field of WSNs. Recently, a lot of researched related WSNs have been conducted and people have been realizing its unlimited applicability. Though WSNs has great potential and is employed in variety of environments, it comes with some limitations as the Sensor nodes used in WSN shave limited processing capability, low power battery; low bandwidth for communication and less memory space. We proposed a new hybrid Clustering protocol for Multi-level heterogeneous wireless sensor networks in this paper. In this proposed approach, some nodes send data to sink directly while some use clustering technique to send data to sink. The proposed protocol aims to conserve energy by keeping three key design factors into consideration: (1) Finding the optimal distance up to which a node can directly send the data to base station, (2) electing an appropriate node as cluster head and (3) limiting the number of clusters in the network. The simulation results show that EEHCP enhanced the stability period by approximately 75% and almost tripled the throughput when compared to existing techniques such as LEACH and SEP.