Energy Efficient Multipath Data Fusion Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), data fusion should be energy efficient. But, determining the optimal number of aggregators in an energy efficient manner is a challenging task. Moreover, the existing data fusion techniques mostly use the same path for transmitting aggregated data to the sink which reduces the nodes lifetime. In this paper, we propose a technique which combines energy efficiency and multiple path selection for data fusion in WSN. The network is partitioned into various clusters and the node with highest residual energy is selected as the cluster head. The sink computes multiple paths to each cluster head for data transmission. The distributed source coding and the lifting scheme wavelet transform are used for compressing the data at the CH. During each round of transmission, the path is changed in a round robin manner, to conserve the energy. This process is repeated for each cluster. From our simulation results we show that this data fusion technique has less energy consumption with increased packet delivery ratio, when compared with the existing schemes.