Abstract
One of the current key challenges in wireless sensor networks is the development of routing protocols that provide stable cluster-head election, while prolonging network lifetime by saving energy. In this contribution, a new Stable Election Protocol (SEP), named New-SEP (N-SEP), is presented to prolong the stable period of Fog-supported sensor networks by maintaining balanced energy consumption. N-SEP takes into account some features of sensor nodes (e.g., distance from base station, network heterogeneity ratio, residual/consumed energy, distance between cluster heads (CHs)) in order to elect the best CHs. For this purpose, it exploits heterogeneous energy thresholds, in order to select CHs and prolong the time interval of the system. Simulation results support the capability of the proposed algorithm to maximize the network lifetime and preserve more energy as compared to the results obtained by using current heuristics, such as, Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) and SEP protocols. Additionally, we found that N-SEP outperforms LEACH and SEP in prolonging the stability period of the network by 50% and 25%, respectively.