Energy and Delay Minimization in Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of a large number of power-constrained sensors deployed to collect information in a specific sensed field. How to gather data in an energy-efficient manner is always a very important issue in WSNs. Recently, cluster-based data aggregation is widely used to reduce energy consumption and prolong network lifetime. However, most existing schemes proposed to reduce energy consumption fail to consider the factor of quality of service (QoS), especially the source-to-sink delay and data-loss probability. To address this problem, we propose a novel model which can capture both the factors of energy efficiency and QoS guarantee in WSNs. Through analytical and simulative results, we show that our model has the potential to help deploy the wireless sensor nodes in an energy-efficient manner while still providing a certain level of QoS.