Modulated relay based stable election protocol for large-scale wireless sensor networks

Internet of things (IoT) applications based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently gained vast momentum. These applications vary from health care, smart cities, and military applications to environmental monitoring and disaster prevention. As a result, energy consumption and network lifetime have become the most critical research area of WSNs. Through energy-efficient routing protocols, it is possible to reduce energy consumption and extend the network lifetime for WSNs. Using hybrid routing protocols that incorporate multiple transmission methods is an effective way to improve network performance. This paper proposes modulated R-SEP (MR-SEP) for large-scale WSN-based IoT applications. MR-SEP is based on the well-known stable election protocol (SEP). MR-SEP defines three initial energy levels for the nodes to improve the network energy distribution and establishes multi-hop communication between the cluster heads (CHs) and the base station (BS) through relay nodes (RNs) to reduce the energy consumption of the nodes to reach the BS. In addition, MR-SEP reduces the replacement frequency of CHs, which helps increase network lifetime and decrease power consumption. Simulation results show that MR-SEP outperforms SEP, LEACH, and DEEC protocols by 70.2%, 71.58%, and 74.3%, respectively, in terms of lifetime and by 86.53%, 86.68%, and 86.93% in terms of throughput.