Energy-Efficient Aggregation Forwarding for Wireless Sensor Networks

Based on an energy efficiency metric that is defined by the fraction of end-to-end delivery ratio and required energy, we propose a new distributed algorithm for the case of correlated data. In contrast to related work, our metric considers energy savings due to aggregation a priori and achieves a superior performance. However, a problem that arises from the ability to aggregate and to change energy cost during the construction of a forwarding tree is that routing cycles may occur because information used may be out-dated. By employing different types of sequence numbers, our strategy is able to prevent such cycles, accounting for the distributed nature of sensor networks.