Asian Journal of Research in Computer Science

Energy depletion in wireless sensor networks remains a concern for researchers in this emerging technology. However, several enhanced routing protocols are being designed to reduce the energy consumption in these networks and improve their lifetime. The Zonal Stable Election Protocol was carefully studied. It was observed that, no cluster head selection is done in zone 0 because of the nearest of some of the normal nodes to the Base station. This approach appeared effective for a short period of time, especially for the nodes that are really closer to the Base station. However, when some of the nodes in Zone 0 are a little farther away and the network operation is longer, the nodes are seen dying very quickly. Also, the existing scheme is observed to be transmitting captured data unnecessarily without considering the amount of data required by each node before transmission. In this research, a reactive heterogeneous routing scheme called the Enhanced Zonal Stable Election protocol (EZ-SEP) is proposed. The new scheme introduced clustering techniques in all the Zones. Cluster heads are selected based on their residual energy and relative distance from the base station. This is to ensure that the energetic heads that can transmit data to the Base station are selected. Furthermore, the new scheme introduced inter-cluster transmission and multi-hop communication to ensure effective energy distribution among the nodes while using hard and soft thresholds to reduce unnecessary data transmission to the Base station.  Simulation was conducted to evaluate the performance of the new scheme using MATLAB R2018a, and the results showed that EZ- SEP outperformed Zonal SEP in terms of coverage, throughput approximately, 50%, stability period, residual energy and network lifetime.