I-SEP: An Improved Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous WSN for IoT-Based Environmental Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a virtual layer in the paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT). It inter-relates information associated with the physical domain to the IoT drove computational systems. WSN provides an ubiquitous access to location, the status of different entities of the environment, and data acquisition for long-term IoT monitoring. Since energy is a major constraint in the design process of a WSN, recent advances have led to project various energy-efficient protocols. Routing of data involves energy expenditure in considerable amount. In recent times, various heuristic clustering protocols have been discussed to solve the purpose. This article is an improvement of the existing stable election protocol (SEP) that implements a threshold-based cluster head (CH) selection for a heterogeneous network. The threshold maintains uniform energy distribution between member and CH nodes. The sensor nodes are also categorized into three different types called normal, intermediate, and advanced depending on the initial energy supply to distribute the network load evenly. The simulation result shows that the proposed scheme outperforms SEP and DEEC protocols with an improvement of 300% in network lifetime and 56% in throughput.