Directional Flooding Scheme with Data Aggregation for Energy-Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose a directional flooding with data aggregation (DFDA) using hop-count values of sensor nodes for energy-efficient wireless sensor networks. In DFDA, the hop-counts of sensor nodes are used to discover the route to the sink. The packets of sensor nodes are aggregated in intermediate nodes and delivered to the sink or neighbors with direction to the sink. In addition, we develop a constrained data aggregation mechanism that discards the redundant data in intermediate nodes. Data aggregation is widely accepted as an essential paradigm for energy-efficient routing in wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme, DFDA, achieves energy savings by reducing the redundant transmissions using directional flooding based on hop-count and data aggregation. Our simulation results show that DFDA achieves significant improvement in energy consumption.