ATP: An Aggregation and Transmission Protocol for Conserving Energy in Periodic Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), redundant collected measures and the resulting redundant packets to sendto the sink are likely to happen repeatedly. As transmission is an expensive issue in term of energy, eliminating data redundancy and reducing communication load can minimize energy consumption and extend the whole network lifetime. In this paper, we propose an adaptive protocol composed of two phases, called aggregation and transmission protocol (ATP), that operates on each sensor node separately in order to reduce its data transmission and to save energy. We consider a cluster-based scheme in which data is sent periodically from sensor nodes to their appropriate Cluster-Heads (CHs). The proposed protocol searches, during aggregation phase, similarities between data captured during a period p in order to eliminate redundancy from raw data. While during transmission phase, sensor node searches periodic correlation of data, using one way ANOVA model and Fisher test. The proposed protocol was successfully tested on real sensor data. The obtained results show that ATP can significantly minimize energy consumption, comparing to other existing data aggregation techniques, without affecting the quality of data.