Hybrid Energy-Efficient Clustering Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with numerous spatially distributed sensors can accurately monitor a remote environment, such as humidity, pressure, distance, etc. and cooperatively send the data, combing from the individual nodes, to base station (BS). Energy saving is a great challenge for WSNs which have limited power. Many protocols based on the clustering algorithm are specifically put forward for WSNs, such as LEACH, DEEC, SEP, TEEN, and etc. In this paper, we provide and analyze a new hybrid energy-efficient clustering (HEEC) protocol designed for heterogeneous environment in WSNs. In HEEC, Cluster Head (CH) selection depends on the ratio of surplus energy of every node to average energy of the whole network. Moreover, in order to save and balance energy conservation and suit time-critical applications' requirement, we introduce threshold of detected data by each node. Simulation results and theoretical analysis represent the proposed protocol outperforms DDEEC and TEEN in terms of network lifetime, stability period, data packets received by BS and energy consumption in wireless sensor networks.