Many-to-many data aggregation scheduling in wireless sensor networks with two sinks

Traditionally, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed with a single sink. Due to the emergence of sophisticated applications, WSNs may require more than one sink. Moreover, deploying more than one sink may prolong the network lifetime and address fault tolerance issues. Several protocols have been proposed for WSNs with multiple sinks. However, most of them are routing protocols. Differently, our main contribution, in this paper, is the development of a distributed data aggregation scheduling (DAS) algorithm for WSNs with two sinks. We also propose a distributed energy-balancing algorithm to balance the energy consumption for the aggregators. The energy-balancing algorithm first forms trees rooted at nodes which are termed virtual sinks and then balances the number of children at a given level to level the energy consumption. Subsequently, the DAS algorithm takes the resulting balanced tree and assigns contiguous slots to sibling nodes, to avoid unnecessary energy waste due to frequent active-sleep transitions. We prove a number of theoretical results and the correctness of the algorithms. Through simulation and testbed experiments, we show the correctness and performance of our algorithms.