Enforcing Fairness for Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

The well known many–to–one data routingparadigm [1] in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) demands non–uniform medium access and forwarding strategy to achieve theultimate node level fairness. Since nodes closer to the sink havemore traffic than that of far–away nodes, close–by nodes needto employ different frequency of media access and forwardingprobability such that sink receives almost equal number ofpackets from all the nodes in the network. In this paper, wedesign a distributed fair data collection protocol where the nodescan decide their media access and packet forwarding strategieswithin the WSN such that a fair throughput can be enjoyed byeach node irrespective of the node’s distance from the sink. Wedemonstrate the effectiveness of our solution through simulationsand results show that the proposed protocol ensures the fairdelivery of packets, improves throughput and reduces end–to–end delay for the different WSN scenarios under study.