Zone-Based Clustering Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of hundreds or thousands of sensor nodes each of which is capable of sensing, processing, and transmitting environmental information. While wireless sensor networks (WSN) are increasingly equipped to handle more complex functions, innetwork processing still requires the battery powered sensors to judiciously use their constrained energy so as to prolong the effective network life time. There are a few protocols using sensor clusters to coordinate the energy consumption in a WSN. In this paper, we propose a Zone based Heterogeneous Energy Efficient Clustering (ZHEEC) protocol in order to balance the energy consumption among all nodes. In this protocol we have divided the network into various equal size zones. We have implemented ZHEEC protocol in network simulator: MATLAB. Simulation results show that our method outperforms LEACH in terms of network lifetime.