A data gathering algorithm based on energy-balanced connected dominating sets in wireless sensor networks

Data gathering is one of the most basic applications of wireless sensor networks. How to effectively preserve the energy of the nodes in order to extend the network lifetime is a challenging problem in data gathering. Currently, many researches focus on constructing a virtual backbone of the network by using minimum connected dominating sets. Each node in the network can transmit its data to the sink by the virtual backbone. However, the minimum connected dominating sets may result in unbalanced energy consumption among nodes, which shortens lifetime of the network and consequently limits their application in many fields. In this paper, we propose an energy-balanced connected dominating set distributed scheme (DGA-EBCDS) which prolongs the network lifetime by constructing an energy-balanced connected dominating set for data gathering. When constructing the virtual backbone in DGAEBCDS, we prioritize selecting those nodes with higher energy and larger degree. This makes the energy consumption among nodes more balanced. Furthermore, the routing decision in DGAEBCDS considers both the path length and the remaining energy of nodes on the path. This further prolongs the lifetime of nodes in the backbone and hence extends the lifetime of the whole network. We theoretically analyze the DGA-EBCDS algorithm and conduct extensive simulations to evaluate its performance. Simulation results show that DGA-EBCDS outperforms mr-CDS by prolonging the network lifetime by more than 50 percent.