In the era of IoT, the energy consumption of sensor nodes in WSN is one of the main challenges. It is crucial to reduce energy consumption due to the limited battery life of the sensor nodes. Recently, Zone-based Energy-Aware data coLlection (ZEAL) routing protocol is proposed to improve energy consumption and data delivery. In this paper, an enhancement to ZEAL is proposed to improve WSN performance in terms of energy consumption and data delivery. Enhanced ZEAL (E-ZEAL) applies the K-means clustering algorithm to find the optimal path for the mobile-sink node. As well, it provides better selections for sub-sink nodes. The experiments are performed using the ns-3 simulator. The performance of E-ZEAL is compared to ZEAL. E-ZEAL reduces the number of hops and distance by more than 50%, Leading to speed up the data-collection phase by more than 30% with complete delivery of data. Moreover, E-ZEAL improves the lifetime of the network by 30%. |