Enhanced EECP: Enhanced Energy Efficient Coverage Preserving Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

In WSNs, sensor nodes are resource constrained nodes where limited energy capacity is the most crucial constraint which affects the network lifetime. In the literature, clustering is a well-known technique which helps to prolong the lifetime of the network. With respect to energy consumption, efficient cluster heads (CHs) selection advertisement and cluster formation in every round are costly within a cluster. The energy efficient coverage preserving (EECP) protocol was developed to provide efficient coverage for longer duration where new CH(s) selection advertisement and cluster formation are performed only when sink finds a better CH candidate in comparison to previously selected CH node. The hybrid routing of EECP protocol assumes single-hop communication from cluster member (CM) to CH and CH to CH/sink. But in case of large network, it is not necessary that the nearest CH/sink is within the communication range of source node. Therefore, nodes must transmit their data towards the sink in multi-hop manner. Also for CHs selection in EECP protocol, sink requires residual energy information of nodes in every round which causes rapid energy consumption of nodes in large network. To handle this issue, Enhanced EECP protocol is proposed in this paper where sink receives residual energy information only when CH’s energy goes below the certain threshold. This minimizes the energy consumption of the network to some extent. The simulation results show that proposed Enhanced EECP protocol prolongs the network and coverage lifetime by 50.35% and 157.59% respectively in comparison to EECP protocol.