Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks are widely used to perform real-time applications like military surveillance, environmental monitoring and health care systems. Since sensor nodes are battery powered, developing an energy efficient algorithm to increase the network life time is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a multilevel energy efficient protocol, namely EM-AEDEEC, in which we extend the heterogeneity up to k-level. The protocol is analyzed for network life time and network stability. The experiments are carried out in a simulated grid of size 100 100 with varying number of sensor nodes. The simulation results demonstrate that with the increase in initial energy from 0.25 to 0.5 to 1.0 Joules, the stability of the network is almost doubled in the case of Euclidean distance measure and an increase of 7% network life time with Manhattan distance. © 2019 MIR Labs.