Adaptive energy-efficient clustering path planning routing protocols for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Centralized clustering routing schemes promise significant network stability by centralized energy-efficient path planning that prominently share computational burden of monitoring devices of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Scalability and adaptiveness of WSNs present vital challenges for researchers to design a power-aware, well-organized routing schemes that can maintain centralized routing decisions and distributed data forwarding. Investigations on central cluster formation acknowledge the fact that higher computation and energy resources of Base Station (BS) are still required in specific network conditions and need more careful path planning to generalized their performance validity. In this paper, we propose two energy-efficient path planning routing protocols for three level heterogeneous WSNs namely, Two-Hop heterogeneity-aware Centralized Energy Efficient Clustering (THCEEC) and Advanced heterogeneity-aware CEEC (ACEEC). Both of these protocols are derived from Centralized Energy Efficient Clustering (CEEC) in different manner to deal with the fluctuation of network deployments and adoptive transmission range of WSNs. BS utilizes algorithms of THCEEC and ACEEC routing protocols to identify the suitable Cluster-Heads (CHs) by considering initial energy, residual energy, regional flag, and distance to BS. The proposed algorithms require intelligent distribution of energy resources evenly across the heterogeneous WSNs in initial stage of cluster formation. Extensive simulation results confirm the reliability and energy efficient performance enhancements of the centralized cluster formations of CEEC, ACEEC and THCEEC, which acquire better network lifetime and successful data forwarding as compared to the conventional distributed routing protocols of LEACH, SEP, ESEP, and DEEC. Furthermore, ACEEC outperforms CEEC and provides more network stability period. Analytical evaluation shows that THCEEC outperforms CEEC, ACEEC, and the other existing state of the art path planning routing protocols.