Design of structure-free and energy-balanced data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

Power saving is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks since sensor nodes are battery-powered. Data aggregation is an effective approach to save energy because the number of transmissions can be reduced after aggregation. In the literature, most of the data aggregation protocols rely on a structured architecture to accomplish data gathering. Such structure-based methods suffer from high maintenance overhead in a dynamic environment where sensor nodes may move or fail unexpectedly. In this paper, we propose a structure-free and energy-balanced data aggregation protocol, SFEB. SFEB features both efficient data gathering and balanced energy consumption, which results from its two-phase aggregation process and the dynamic aggregator selection mechanism. Analysis, extensive simulation, and real system implementation results verify the superiority of the proposed mechanism.