Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a distributed self-organizing network composed of a large number of sensor nodes. The sensor nodes are powered by batteries, and their limited energy seriously affects the life cycle of the network. In this paper, we introduced a new heterogeneous awareness routing protocol to elect a more reasonable cluster head, which comprehensively considers the residual energy of the node, the density of neighbor nodes and the relative distance to the base station within the coverage radius in clustering stage. We used the MATLAB R2016b simulator to analyze the performance of ED-SEP protocol under the condition of changing the base station location and the initial energy of the node, and it is compared with the stable election protocols. Simulation results show that the network’s stable period of ED-SEP protocol is increased by 29.6% and 25.7% respectively compared with SEP protocol and E-SEP protocol, and the data receiving capacity of base station is nearly three times that of E-SEP protocol. Therefore, the ED-SEP algorithm can effectively improve the energy utilization rate of the network and greatly improve the performance of the wireless sensor network.