An energy-efficient protocol for data gathering and aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Data gathering is a major function of many applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The most important issue in designing a data gathering algorithm is how to save energy of sensor nodes while meeting the requirement of applications/users such as sensing area coverage. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical clustering protocol (DEEG) for long-lived sensor network. DEEG achieves a good performance in terms of lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for in-network communications and balancing the energy load among all the nodes, the proposed protocol achieves a good performance in terms of network lifetime. DEEG can also handle the energy hetergenous capacities and guarantee that out-network communications always occur in the subregion with high energy reserved. Furthermore, it introduces a simple but efficient approach to cope with the area coverage problem. We evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol using a simple temperature sensing application. Simulation results show that our protocol significantly outperforms LEACH and PEGASIS in terms of network lifetime and the amount of data gathered.