A New Energy-Balanced Data Aggregation Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

For wireless sensor networks (WSNs), how to design routing protocols is very important to gather data efficiently so that the life of the network can be prolonged. A usual concept to collect data by a sink node is to transfer data from sensor nodes to the sink node by multi-hop. However, it gives rise to two problems. The first one is the hotspot problem, in which the sensor nodes closer to the sink node run out of energy sooner than other nodes. As a result, the network loses its service ability, regardless of a large amount of residual energy of the other nodes. The second one is that the network generates unnecessary traffic during data transmission for choosing a proper data sending path. To resolves the problems, we, in this paper, propose a new energy-balanced data aggregation scheme in WSNs. The proposed scheme pre-determines a set of paths and runs them in round-robin fashion so that all the nodes can participate in the workload of gathering data and transferring them to the sink node. With simulation results, we show that our scheme is more energy efficient and hence it can prolong the life time of the network than the existing schemes directed diffusion and hierarchical data aggregation (HDA).