Multi-Chain Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Data gathering is a fundamental operation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Due to the limited battery power, energy conservation is an essential issue to reduce the total energy consumption of sensor nodes and prolong the network lifetime. In addition, the transmission delay of a round is also an important factor in data gathering applications. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Chain Data Gathering (MCDG) protocol for WSNs. MCDG organizes all sensor nodes to form a single chain that is further divided into several subchains of unequal size. In each subchain, an aggregation node is assigned for reducing the transmission delay and some of the other nodes take turns to be a subchain leader for balanced energy consumption. All subchain leaders cooperate to forward data to the base station. The objective of MCDG is to achieve energy-efficient data gathering with delay reduction. Simulation results show that MCDG outperforms PEGASIS and COSEN in terms of the number of rounds and the energy × delay cost.