DP-SEP: Distance Aware Prolong Stable Election Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is considered an important issue for designing wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Sensor nodes' heterogeneity is normally utilized to avoid extra energy consumption. An efficient routing protocol can ensure balanced energy consumption among sensor nodes to increase the network lifetime. In this paper, a heterogeneous aware routing protocol, named Distance aware Prolong Stable Election Protocol (DP-SEP), is proposed for energy efficient WSN. DP-SEP includes both the energy and distance considerations in cluster head (CH) selection criteria to prioritize the nodes with high energy and closer distance from the base station (BS) to be selected as CH. The effectiveness of the proposed DP-SEP is verified by comparing its performances with existing protocols such as P-SEP, M-SEP, SEP and LEACH-DCHS. The simulation results show that the proposed DP-SEP protocol outperforms existing routing protocols in terms of network lifetime, stability period and throughput.