Power Efficient Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In an environment where in a round of communication each of the sensor nodes has data to send to a base station, it is important to minimize the total energy consumed by the system in a round so that the system lifetime is maximized. With the use of data fusion and aggregation techniques, while minimizing the total energy per round, if power consumption per node can be balanced as well, a near optimal data gathering and routing scheme can be achieved in terms of network lifetime. So far, besides the conventional protocol of direct transmission, two elegant protocols called LEACH and PEGASIS have been proposed to maximize the lifetime of a sensor network. In this paper, we compare two new algorithms under name PEDAP (Power Efficient Data gathering and Aggregation Protocol), which are near optimal minimum spanning tree based routing schemes, where one of them is the power-aware version of the other. the results compare which work well both in systems where base station is far away from and where it is in the center of the field. PEDAP achieves between 4x to 20x improvement in network lifetime compared with LEACH, and about three times improvement compared with PEGASIS.