An Application Dependent Communication Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network consists of a number of sensors spread across a geographical area. These battery powered sensors have limited source of energy. Hence, energy efficiency becomes a key design issue. We propose an Application Dependent Communication Protocol (ADCP) based on the concept of Aggregation-aware Minimum Spanning Tree (AMST) which takes into account the aggregation capabilities of sensors and the corresponding application they have been deployed for. We then propose an algorithm for AMST construction inspired from the PageRank algorithm. It is found through simulation that ADCP gives a higher network lifetime than other schemes such as LEACH, PEGASIS, BCDCP and PEDAP.