A Designated Path Scheme for Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

For wireless sensor networks (WSNs), how to design routing protocols is very important to gather data efficiently so that the life of the network can be prolonged. A usual concept to collect data by a sink node is to transfer data from sensor nodes to the sink node by multihop. However, it gives rise to two problems. The first one is that core sensor nodes being more frequently used to gather data run out of energy sooner than other sensor nodes. As a result, the network loses its service ability, regardless of a large amount of residual energy of the other nodes. The second one is that the network generates unnecessary traffic during data transmission for choosing a proper data sending path. To resolves the problems, we, in this paper, propose a designated path scheme for energy balanced data aggregation in WSNs. The proposed scheme predetermines a set of paths and runs them in round robin fashion so that all the nodes can participate in the workload of gathering data and transferring them to the sink node. With our analytical performance analysis, we show that our designated path scheme is more energy efficient and can prolong the life time of the network, compared with the existing two data centric routing schemes, i.e., directed diffusion and hierarchical data aggregation (HDA).