Energy-efficient tree-based cooperative data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Cooperative communication is shown to be a promising technology to significantly reduce the energy consumption. Moreover, data aggregation is an essential operation in wireless sensor networks where the tree-based underlying network structure is often used to support this operation. Thus, this paper studies the energy efficient data aggregation problem through cooperative communication with the aware tree-based topology structure in wireless sensor networks. We first design a polynomial time centralised algorithm to solve this problem. This algorithm starts from an arbitrary aggregation tree and determines the optimal transmission policy and the corresponding time slot for each node to transmit the aggregation data to its father node. We also prove the optimality for this algorithm. Then, a distributed algorithm is proposed in which each node can determine its transmission policy and time slot with only local information. The energy efficiency of the proposed algorithms is evaluated and verified by simulations.