Summary
Multilevel heterogeneity is the present demand of wireless sensor networks as well as internet‐of‐things for balanced energy consumption of the network systems. In this paper, three level hexagonal heterogeneous broad transmission distance protocol (3L‐HEXA‐HTBTDP) is introduced for increasing the energy efficiency of the network. Normal, advanced, and superadvanced sensor nodes in a hexagonal field represent three level heterogeneity. These nodes are elected as cluster heads (CHs) on the basis of new thresholds, thus transferring the collected data to the base station. The protocol is beneficial in cellular communication and web‐of‐things applications to fulfill the high energy requirements of the wireless systems. The scalability is done here for perceiving the differences in the application of proposed algorithm 3L‐HEXA‐HTBTDP on different number of sensor nodes with variable values of initial energies. This is a promising approach to achieve reliable communication, coverage, and connectivity among sensor nodes of the hexagonal field. The scheme is evaluated through exhaustive simulation using Matlab. It is compared with the previous approaches of clustering implemented on the hexagonal field. Different performance parameters like alive node metrics, stability period, network lifetime, residual energy, and variance of energy are used for benchmarking the results of 3L‐HEXA‐HTBTDP with three level hexagonal stable election protocol (3L‐HEXA‐SEP) and three level hexagonal energy efficient heterogeneous clustered scheme (3L‐HEXA‐EEHC). In general, it is observed that the proposed 3L‐HEXA‐HTBTDP outperforms other existing protocols.