A novel data aggregation scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of diverse and minute sensor nodes which are widely employed in different applications, for example, atmosphere monitoring, search and rescue activities, disaster management, untamed life checking and so on. A WSN which is an accumulation of clusters and information exchange occurs with the assistance of cluster head (CH). A lot of sensor nodes' energy is utilized in procedures like detection, information exchange and making clusters using various protocols. In a cluster based WSN, it is profitable to segregate the tasks performed by cluster heads as a fair amount of energy could be conserved. Following this, we propose a solution to include a supplementary node that is named as a 'super node' alongside cluster head in a cluster based WSN in this work. This node is in-charge of all the clusters in a WSN and takes care of the entire cluster's energy information. It manages the cluster heads from their creation to the end. All the clusters in the network send their respective information to this node that eliminates redundant information and forwards the aggregated information towards the sink. This not only saves the CH energy but also conserves individual cluster node's energy by proper monitoring the energy levels. This mechanism enhances the lifetime of the network by minimizing the number of communications between nodes and the sink. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed mechanism, we use various parameters like packet delay, communication overhead and energy consumption that show the optimality of our approach.