Mixed communication method for data gathering and aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Clustering provides an effective way for prolonging the lifetime of a sensor network. However, when cluster heads transmit their data to the sink via multi-hop communication, the cluster heads closer to the sink are burdened with heavy relay traffic and tend to die early. Alternatively, if all cluster heads transmit data to the sink via single-hop communication, the cluster heads further from the sink will die much more quickly than those closer to the sink. To balance the cluster heads energy consumption, we present a mixed communication method where the cluster heads can transmit data to the sink in either single-hop or multi-hop. The simulation results show that our method outperforms LEACH and HEED in terms of network lifetime by balancing energy consumption.