Abstract
Wireless sensor network comprises of thousands of sensor nodes that are deployed in an area to monitor the physical environment. These sensor nodes have limited energy as they are battery powered. To reduce this problem, several routing protocols are designed in order to minimize energy consumption and increase the lifetime of the sensor network. In this paper, we introduced a new heterogeneous routing protocol known as advanced zonal stable election protocol (AZ-SEP) in which communication of sensor nodes with the base station is hybrid, i.e., some nodes communicate directly, while others use clustering mechanism to transmit data to base station. The dimensions of the field are unknown and are divided into three zones on the basis of nodes energy. We examined Z-SEP protocol regarding cluster head selection and communication of cluster head with the base station and introduced a new mechanism of cluster head selection on the basis of residual energy and distance from the base station. The communication between nodes with the base station occurs in a multi-hop fashion. Furthermore, the AZ-SEP is evaluated by taking different evaluation scenarios such as the changing position of the base station, skewed nodes, and variable node energy to compare it with the parent protocol. We implemented the AZ-SEP and compare it with the traditional routing protocol like Z-SEP and SEP protocol. The proposed protocol and its parent protocol are compared through simulation using simulator MATLAB 2014a. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol increases the stability period by increasing the number of alive nodes, packet delivery ratio, and optimizes average energy consumption as related to the existing protocols.