A Power Efficient Algorithm for Data Gathering from Wireless Water Meter Networks

A traditional method to gather water consumption data from water meters in residential areas by using human recorders is costly and time consuming. Many AMR (automatic meter reading) methods have been proposed to assist data gathering. A wireless ad-hoc sensor network configuration could be an alternative to reduce the cost of AMR. Some existing sensor network protocols such as LEACH, PEGASIS, and PEDAP could be applied. However, these protocols may not be perfectly suitable for water meters because data fusion is not possible in this particular application. In this paper, we propose a power efficient data gathering algorithm for wireless water meter networks. This algorithm uses a new approach to generate trees in order to distribute loads of root nodes to achieve a longer network lifetime. Simulation results show that our algorithm could yield better performances than a classical minimum spanning tree algorithm used in some existing algorithms such as PEDAP.