In recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) received great attention because of their important applications in many areas. Consequently, a need for improving their performance and efficiency, especially in energy awareness, is of a great interest. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a lifetime improvement fixed clustering energy awareness routing protocol for WSNs named Load Balancing Cluster Head (LBCH) protocol. LBCH mainly aims at reducing the energy consumption in the network and balancing the workload over all nodes within the network. A novel method for selecting initial cluster heads (CHs) is proposed. In addition, the network nodes are evenly distributed into clusters to build balanced size clusters. Finally, a novel scheme is proposed to circulate the role of CHs depending on the energy and location information of each node in each cluster. Multihop technique is used to minimize the communication distance between CHs and the base station (BS) thus saving nodes energy. In order to evaluate the performance of LBCH, a thorough simulation has been conducted and the results are compared with other related protocols (i.e. ACBEC-WSNs-CD, Adaptive LEACH-F, LEACH-F, and RRCH). The simulations showed that LBCH overcomes other related protocols for both continuous data and event-based data models at different network densities. LBCH achieved an average improvement in the range of 2-172%, 18-145.5%, 10.18-62%, 63-82.5% over the compared protocols in terms of number of alive nodes, first node died (FND), network throughput, and load balancing, respectively.

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