Lightweight and Reliable Routing Approach for In-Network Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

ABSTRACT: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in a large scale, will be increasingly deployed in different classes of applications for accurate monitoring. Due to the high density of nodes in these networks, it is likely that redundant data will be detected by nearby nodes when sensing an event. Since energy conservation is a key issue in WSNs, data fusion and aggregation should be exploited in order to save energy. In this case, redundant data can be aggregated at intermediate nodes reducing the size and number of exchanged messages and, thus, decreasing communication costs and energy consumption. In this work, we propose a Routing algorithm for aggregation of nodes in the network, that has some key aspects such as a reduced number of messages number, high aggregation rate, and reliable data aggregation and transmission. The proposed Routing algorithm was extensively compared to two other known solutions: the Information Fusion-based Role Assignment (InFRA) and Shortest Path Tree (SPT) algorithms. Our results indicate clearly that the routing tree built by Routing algorithm provides the best aggregation quality when compared to these other algorithms. The obtained results show that our proposed solution outperforms these solutions in different scenarios and in different key aspects required by WSNs