Energy-efficient topology construction for multi-attribute data gathering in WSNs

Environmental monitoring is a crucial application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This kind of application generally requires a certain geographical granularity of sensing. In addition, some applications simultaneously gathers sensor readings with different attributes. In this paper, we propose a topology construction method that prolongs the lifetime of a WSN which gathers multi-attribute sensor readings. In our proposed method, a minimum number of sensor nodes are selected to acquire sensor readings for each attribute that satisfies the application requirement. For gathering the acquired readings, our method constructs a tree-shaped topology considering the sum of residual energies of nodes and the granularity of sensing for each attribute. By doing so, our method avoids exhausting batteries of nodes which can acquire a specific attribute. We confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method through simulation experiments.