Power efficient data gathering and aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Recent developments in processor, memory and radio technology have enabled wireless micro-sensor networks which are deployed to collect useful information from an area of interest. The sensed data must be gathered and transmitted to a base station where it is further processed for end-user queries. Since the network consists of low-cost nodes with limited battery power, power efficient methods must be employed for data gathering and aggregation in order to achieve long network lifetimes. In an environment where each of the sensor nodes has data to send to a base station in a round of communication, it is important to minimize the total energy consumed by the system in a round so that the system lifetime is maximized. A near optimal data gathering and routing scheme can be achieved in terms of network lifetime, while minimizing the total energy per round with the use of data fusion and aggregation techniques, if power consumption per node can be balanced as well. So far, different routing protocols have been proposed to maximize the lifetime of a sensor network. In this thesis, we propose two new protocols PEDAP (Power Efficient Data gathering and Aggregation Protocol) and PEDAP-PA (PEDAPPower Aware), which are minimum spanning tree based routing schemes, where one of them is the power-aware version of the other. Our simulation results show that our protocols perform well both in systems where base station is far away from and where it is in the center of the field.