CHATSEP: Critical heterogeneous adaptive threshold sensitive election protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Networking together of hundreds to thousands of limited energy battery powered nodes derive a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The use and applicability of WSNs has increased in vivid areas like vehicular movement, weather monitoring, security and surveillance, industry applications etc. The limited powered nodes in WSNs sense the environment and send the desired information to a processing centre (base station) either directly or via a mechanism for optimization. In this paper we propose CHATSEP, a clustering protocol for reactive networks with threshold sensitive heterogeneous sensor nodes. It includes an adaptive characteristic which helps the base station to be aware of the status of the nodes in situations when the nodes are idle from a long time and hence helping the base station to analyze the information network dynamically and efficiently. It also incorporates Critical Threshold which is any information of utmost importance in the network, and when such information is sensed it has to be sent to base station with highest priority. Our proposed protocol with adaptive nature and criticality of information is observed to perform better than the conventional clustering protocols like LEACH, SEP and TSEP in terms of stability period, network lifetime and throughput for a temperature sensing application.