A Reliable Data Aggregation Forwarding Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Extensive research has been done on reliable data forwarding in sensor networks. Existing protocols provide reliability at the cost of high energy consumption. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), data aggregation is essentially used to gather and aggregate data in an energy efficient manner so that network lifetime is enhanced. Power consumption is an important aspect to be considered in the data aggregation which is a scarce resource and they are irreplaceable. In this paper, we propose to design an energy efficient reliable data aggregation technique for wireless sensor networks. Initially we form clusters and a coordinator node (CN) is selected near the cluster in order to monitor the nodes in the cluster. The CN selects a cluster head (CH) in each cluster based upon the energy level and the distance to the CN. The packets sent by the sensor nodes are aggregated at the CH and transmitted to the CN. The CN measures the loss ratio and compares it with a threshold value of loss ratio. Depending upon this value, the forward node count is incremented or decremented and the cluster size is adaptively changed, ensuring reliability and balanced energy consumption. We have compared the new protocol with Distributed power control Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for wireless Sensor Networks (DPC-EERP) using NS-2, and evaluated the protocol by varying nodes. The result shows that our A Reliable Data Aggregation forwarding protocol for wireless sensor networks (RDAFP) outperforms the DPC-EERP.