*5.3. Network Stability and Network Lifetime*

In order to increase efficiency and throughput, we must transmit more data to the BS and, in this case, it is necessary to prevent node death. Therefore, efficiency and throughput can be improved by increasing network stability. In Tables 4 and 5, the performance of the stability period and the network lifetime involving FND, 10% PND, 20% PND, HND, and LND of the protocols was determined for the first and second scenarios. In both scenarios, the proposed protocol had better performance compared to ECDC, HUCL, and EADUC-II algorithms. Our proposed method had significantly improved performance with very high stability in two different spaces. HCD gets help from the information of neighbor nodes for clustering and uses intercluster and intracluster as well as multihop transmission appropriately. In Tables 4 and 5, the obtained results indicate that the proposed protocol could improve some parameters and be able to transmit more packets in the event of these parameters occurrence. It was emphasized that these nodes that do not have suitable energy status should not become a CH. Since CH node consumes more energy emphasizing this idea resulted in dividing energy consumption equally between the nodes during simulation time. The presented protocol helped reducing energy consumption in the network by deleting unusual control messages and reducing overhead; therefore, it resulted in a prolonged network lifetime.

**Table 4.** Simulation results of stability period and lifetime for scenario 1.



**Table 5.** Simulation results of stability period and lifetime for scenario 2.

Table 6 shows the performance of the proposed protocol in comparison to the other three protocols. In order to evaluate it better, we showed the improvement percentage of above-mentioned criteria in Table 6. The measurement showed that the presented protocol increased network stability considerably. The ECDC protocol acts as distributed and dynamic, but the protocols of HUCL, EADUC-II, and the proposed protocol act as hybrid and distributed. When HCD was compared to HUCL, it increased the network stability to 156.5% and 320.8% in the first and second scenarios, respectively. We compared the proposed protocol with EADUC-II and noticed that this protocol had increased the network stability to 78.1% and 141.1% in the first and second scenarios, respectively.

**Table 6.** HCD protocol improvement in comparison with other protocols in simulation scenarios.

