Performance Evaluation of a Zone-based Three-level Heterogeneous Clustering Protocol for WSNs.

This paper proposes a zone-based three-level heterogeneous clustering protocol (ZB-TLHCP) for heterogeneous WSNs. In ZB-TLHCP, the sensor field/region is divided into zones where super, advance, and normal nodes are deployed uniformly and randomly. The performance of the proposed ZB-TLHCP system is compared with that of zonal-stable election protocol (Z-SEP), distributed energy efficient clustering (DEEC), and threshold-based DEEC (TDEEC) protocol by varying the number of super and advance nodes, their energy levels for the fixed sensor field, and the total number of nodes. Matlab simulation results revealed that the proposed ZB-TLHCP solution performed better than Z-SEP, DEEC, and TDEEC protocols, as it increased the instability period, prolonged the network's lifetime, and achieved higher throughput values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]