Dual-channel based energy efficient event clustering and data gathering in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), now-a-days, are deployed in environmental data collection as well as in critical event monitoring. Successful data collection requires reliability while reliable event detection necessitates timeliness. Simultaneous data gathering and event monitoring is not well studied in literature. In this paper, we propose a system model that works on homogeneous data gathering WSNs. When an event occurs, an event cluster with a different transmission channel is formed and both data gathering and event monitoring are performed at the same time. The proposed model has a novel routing strategy with a built-in congestion control technique to provide timely delivery of event data. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than known similar techniques in terms of reliable data gathering and reliable timely event monitoring. It also enhances the network lifetime significantly compared to other existing methods.