Energy aware distributed data gathering and aggregation protocol to improve wireless sensor network’s longevity

Sensor webs consisting of nodes with limited battery power and wireless communication capability are deployed to collect useful information from an environment. Gathering sensed information in an energy efficient manner is critical to operate the sensor network for a long period of time. In [W. Heinzelman et al., 2000] a data collection problem is defined where each sensor node has a packet to be sent to the distant base station, in a round of communication. If each node transmits its sensed data directly to the base station then it will deplete its power quickly. The LEACH protocol presented in [W. Heinzelman et al., 2000] is an elegant solution where clusters are formed to fuse data before transmitting it to the base station. In this paper, we propose a distributed energy aware data gathering and aggregation protocol (EADAP) in which a node that is going to aggregate the data is chosen based on its residual energy and environment conditions. The nodes in the network thus lose their energy uniformly and die in a phased manner. Our simulation results prove that the longevity of sensor networks with the proposed algorithm, increase as compared to LEACH and Directed Diffusion.