An Effective Data Aggregation Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are tiny devices with limited computation and energy capacities. For such devices, data transmission is a very energy-consuming operation. It thus becomes essential to increase the lifetime of a WSN by minimizing the number of bits sent by each device. One well known approach is to aggregate sensor data. Data aggregation is used to eliminate redundancy and minimize the number of transmissions in order to save energy. Most energy efficient aggregation protocols have focused on cluster-based structure approaches. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of data aggregation by focusing on two aspects of the problem: first how to improve cluster-based routing algorithms to achieve the least of energy consumption for aggregating data, and second analyzing and utilizing some aggregation techniques which are used in different applications. We start by making comparison over three well known cluster based algorithms of LEACH, HEED, and DWEHC based on clustering features, then we will simulate two aggregation techniques of Differential and Integrated Data compression which show significant improvements in prolonging network lifetime. We then would like to extend the LEACH protocol to adaptive intra and inter-cluster topologies which are deployed to improve the energy efficiency of the system, and utilize Differential Data compression as an aggregation technique. Simulation results would be used to investigate the performance of the algorithm.