ZET: Zone and energy threshold based clustering routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have an extensive range of applications but they have many challenging problems to be addressed. The energy consumption of nodes and the extension of network lifetime are among the core challenges. Energy aware routing is one of the methods to solve the energy problem of WSNs. To achieve the desired network operations the clustering (Hierarchical) routing protocols showed remarkable and outstanding improvement in prolonging the lifetime of WSNs. More significantly, heterogeneity-aware and threshold-based (application-aware) clustering routing protocols deal with more practical and realistic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new clustering routing protocol, ZET (Zone and Energy Threshold based Clustering Routing Protocol) that is application-aware and heterogeneity-aware. In the execution environment, ZET distributed algorithm divides the whole network area into multiple zones. After dividing the nodes into multiple zones, ZET will select a cluster-head node with the highest energy-efficiency in each zone. We initially design the ZET for homogeneous network in which initial energy is same for all nodes. Then we introduce the heterogeneity in its execution network. We evaluate the performance of ZET using MATLAB simulations. The results show that ZET has better network life time, stability and throughput compared with existing routing protocols.