A Reliable Routing Approach for In-Network Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks are deployed densely in close proximity to the phenomenon to be monitored accurately in different applications. As these networks are highly populated, the data generated will be enormous. Since communication is the most expensive activity in terms of energy, Data aggregation technique should be made use of while transmitting data to the sink to save energy. With data fusion the size and number of packets transmitted can be reduced by aggregating the messages from sources in the intermediate nodes, thus decreasing communication cost, data traffic and energy consumption. For the network using data aggregation, the routing of data to the sink is an important and critical part in the processing, as the loss of aggregated data packets will have immense impact for data inference at the sink. Moreover, the routing technique used should be capable of reliable data transmission in all situations. In this paper, a novel data routing approach for in-network aggregation called DRINA (Data Routing for In-Network Aggregation) is proposed, that has the features such as reduced number of messages for setting up the routing tree, maximized number of overlapping routes, high aggregation rate and reliable data transmission even in the nodes failure situation. DRINA is compared with two other known methods: Information Fusion- based Role Assignment (InFRA) and Shortest Path Tree (SPT) algorithms using Network Simulator and is proved to be outperforming in all the evaluated scenarios. The future work will incorporate method to reduce the network overhead and to improve the aggregation rate.