Hierarchical routing protocol for multi-level heterogeneous sensor network

The energy consumption is one of the main problems which remain to be addressed in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Therefore, in recent years several clustering routing protocols for homogeneous and heterogeneous sensor networks have been proposed since these protocols are playing a key role in reducing energy consumption of the WSNs. A new Multi-Level Energy-Efficient Clustering (MLEEC) heterogeneous protocol is reported in this paper, where an optimal clustering and a thresh-old for Cluster Head (CH) election are proposed. The numerical results obtained show that the proposed protocol exceeds the performance of existing representatives of heterogeneous WSN routing protocols in term of lifetime and the number of messages received by the sink node. In addition, the balancing of the energy dissipated between the nodes is more important than for the other protocols.