Energy efficient intra-cluster data aggregation technique for wireless sensor network

Abstract

Cluster based routing strategies are popular categories of routing protocols among wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In a typical cluster based routing protocols, few nodes are elected as cluster Head (CH) nodes and they form clusters with other nodes of the networks known as cluster members. The data sensed by cluster members is sent to CH node for data aggregation and further processing. Data Aggregation is considered to be one of the important methods used to prolong the network lifetime of WSN. Data aggregation is quite popular among cluster based routing protocols for WSN, where the data packets are aggregated by intermediate nodes till it reaches to BS. Data aggregation ultimately helps in reducing the number of data messages thereby assisting in network life prolongation. In this paper, an intra-cluster data aggregation technique (ICA) for WSNs is proposed. ICA constructs the intra cluster data aggregation path from a source node to its CH node in an energy efficient way. The data packets are aggregated along the aggregation path by intermediate relay nodes till the message reaches to designated CH node. Comparative analysis of ICA, LEACH and LEACH-C protocols are carried by considering the parameters such as number of alive nodes, energy consumption, number of data packets received by BS. Results obtained show that ICA performs better compared to LEACH and LEACH-C protocols.