An Efficient Hybrid Data-Gathering Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

For time-sensitive applications requiring frequent data gathering from a remote wireless sensor network, it is a challenging task to design an efficient routing scheme that can minimize delay and also offer good performance in energy efficiency and network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a new data gathering scheme which is a combination of clustering and shortest hop pairing of the sensor nodes. The cluster heads and the super leader are rotated every round for ensuring an evenly distributed energy consumption among all the nodes. We have implemented the proposed scheme in nesC and performed simulations in TOSSIM. Successful packet transmission rates have also been studied using the interference-model. Compared with the existing popular schemes such as PEGASIS, BINARY, LBEERA and SHORT, our scheme offers the best “energy × delay” performance and has the capability to achieve a very good balance among different performance metrics.