| In this work we analyze the impact of node heterogeneity, in terms of their energy, in wireless sensor networks and proposed an energy-efficient communication protocol, NAEEC.;NAEEC is a three phase distributed deterministic hierarchical clustering protocol that exploits the characteristics of heterogeneous sensor networks and choose the relatively high energy nodes as the cluster-heads with their efficient placements. Every new execution of NAEEC protocol in the beginning of a round updates the role of the sensor nodes depending upon their present characteristics, and thus provides a well balanced distribution of cluster-head load among the relatively rich energy sensor nodes. The clusters formed by NAEEC are highly efficient in a way that they reduce the overall system communication energy requirement and number of dead nodes formed over the time.;NAEEC assumes a system model where a fraction of nodes are equipped with additional energy to form heterogeneous networks. It is also assumes that the sensor nodes are randomly distributed in a large numbers over the field are, and are not mobile. Without loss of generality, we assumed that the sink is located at the center of the sensor field and the coordinates of the sink is known.;On the simulation side we compare our NAEEC protocol with the LEACH and show that the energy requirement of NAEEC is much less than LEACH. We also show and compare the number of dead nodes formed over time for both NAEEC and LEACH protocols. In the end, we find that with increasing network size the increase in the energy requirement for NAEEC is comparatively much smaller than LEACH. |
