FIEPE: Fuzzy Inspired Energy Efficient Protocol for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network

Besides sensing, computation, and communication of sensed data, the nodes near the base station have an additional responsibility to forward the data from far away nodes, leading to higher energy consumption around the base station. A solution to this bottleneck is to provide additional energy to such nodes, forming heterogeneous networks. Further stochastic cluster head selection leads to asymmetric energy dissipation among the nodes. This paper presents a fuzzy inspired energy-efficient protocol for a heterogeneous wireless sensor network with three types of nodes to compute feasibility of nodes to be assigned as cluster heads based on the residual energy of the node, its proximity to the base station, concentration and centrality. Most feasible nodes are assigned as cluster heads, followed by clustering and data transmission. The paper also mathematically derives optimal heterogeneity parameters to identify the number of nodes of a particular type along with the amount of energy to a particular node type. Further, the tradeoff between network timeline and percentage area covered too has been analyzed. The current work has been compared with recent protocols and the simulation outcomes show that FIEPE fairly justifies the network timeline requirement along with maximum percentage area coverage.