Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being used in wide areas of applications for data collection and processing. Energy management is one of the crucial issues that need special attention in WSNs. But most of the existing solutions for energy management are restricted in defining the number of levels for node heterogeneity for efficient energy management. Due to this restriction, a performance degradation has been observed in most of the applications in WSNs. Hence, keeping in the view of the aforementioned issue, in this paper, we proposed a new energy-efficient multilevel heterogeneous routing (EEMHR) protocol for WSNs. Nodes are divided in to k levels of hierarchy in the proposed solution. A variable threshold defined by the ratio of number of alive nodes for current round to the total number of nodes is proposed for the selection of cluster heads. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated by varying the various parameters of the network in comparison with other state-of-the-art protocols such as stable election protocol (SEP) and multihop communication routing (MCR). Simulation results show that by varying the initial energy and node heterogeneity parameters, the network lifetime of EEMHR is improved by 17% in comparison with SEP and MCR. Moreover, EEMHR provides better stability and distribution of cluster heads in comparison with SEP and MCR. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.