DE-SEP: Distance and Energy Aware Stable Election Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network

Sensing technology has undergone a revolution as a result of technological advancements, where the wireless sensor network (WSN) is considered as a major research area in recent times. WSN is made up of battery-powered multiple sensor nodes with limited energy, which eventually encourage the researchers in designing an energy efficient routing protocol to prolong the network lifetime. Hierarchical routing protocols can play an important role to improve the network’s energy efficiency utilizing the threshold-based cluster head (CH) selection techniques. In this article, a cluster based proactive routing protocol named as Distance and Energy Aware Stable Election Routing Protocol (DE-SEP) is proposed to ensure optimum energy conservation. Here, both the energy and distance criteria are incorporated in CH selection to give priority for comparatively higher energy nodes and nearby nodes from base station (BS) to be selected as CH. Moreover, the proposed protocol imposes a limit on the number of CHs so that an optimum number of CHs can be utilized to avoid unnecessary cluster formation and reduce energy consumption. Simulation results show that DE-SEP outperforms the existing baseline protocols like P-SEP, M-SEP and SEP in terms of various performance matrices such as network lifetime, stability period, half lifetime, throughput, and normalized residual energy. In particular, the performance of DE-SEP protocol in terms of normalized residual energy is increased by a maximum of 5%, 41% and 41% in comparison to P-SEP, M-SEP and SEP respectively.