TEMSEP: Threshold-Oriented and Energy-Harvesting Enabled Multilevel SEP Protocol for Improving Energy-Efficiency of Heterogeneous WSNs

Energy-saving in WSN-based monitoring systems has drawn considerable interest lately. Further investigations and real efforts are needed to reduce the rapid energy consumption in such networks that commonly use battery-operated nodes. In this paper, we propose TEMSEP (Threshold-oriented and Energy-harvesting enabled Multi-level Stable Election Protocol) for improving the energy of large-scale WSNs. TEMSEP is a reactive protocol basing on hierarchical clustering, energy-harvesting relay nodes, and multilevel sensor nodes’ heterogeneity that supports unlimited levels of battery initial energy. Instead of continuous data transmission, the network nodes in TEMSEP send their data only when it is necessary by responding reactively to the changes in relevant parameters or events of interest. We introduce a new thresholding model that provides an ideal mechanism for such reactive behaviour in detecting events, based on the values of heterogeneous thresholds and the sliding window formulated. This efficiently regulates the data reporting frequency, and hence, directly achieves significant reductions in the network traffic-load, optimizes the energy consumption of battery-powered nodes, and maximizes the network lifetime. The extensive simulations show that TEMSEP highly improves the network performance by reducing up to 53% of the network traffic-load and save up to 73% of the total dissipated energy, on average. The stability period and overall network lifetime are increased, at least, by 69% and 56% respectively, compared to other tested protocols.