Energy Efficient Reliable Data Aggregation Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we have developed a new energy efficient routing protocol called An Energy Efficient Reliable Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) using data aggregation technique, data aggregation is essentially used to gather and aggregate data in an energy efficient manner so that network lifetime is enhanced. Data aggregation protocols aims at eliminating redundant data transmission. Power consumption is an important aspect to be considered in the data aggregation which is a scarce resource and they are irreplaceable. In addition to power consumption, reliability is also of major concern in data aggregation. In this paper, we propose to design an energy efficient reliable data aggregation technique for wireless sensor networks (EERDAT). Initially we form clusters and a coordinator node (CN) is selected near the cluster in order to monitor the nodes in the cluster. The CN selects a cluster head (CH) in each cluster based upon the energy level and the distance to the CN. The packets sent by the sensor nodes are aggregated at the CH and transmitted to the CN. The CN measures the loss ratio and compares it with a threshold value of loss ratio. Depending upon this value, the forward node count is incremented or decremented and the cluster size is adaptively changed, ensuring reliability and balanced energy consumption. We have compared the new protocol with Efficient Reliable Data collection (eRDC) using NS-2, evaluated the protocol by varying numbers of nodes. The result shows that EERDAT outperforms the eRDC.