An efficient data aggregation scheme using degree of dependence on clusters in WSNs

Recently, much effort aiming at achieving ubiquitous networks has been made. A ubiquitous network refers to a network environment, which enables anytime and anywhere access, by possibly any given device or by any user. In a ubiquitous network, applications require many types of information such as temperature and so forth. A great deal of attention has been paid to aggregate this information in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). A WSN consists of tiny nodes comprising sensing and communication devices. The information sensed by each node is relayed via other nodes in the WSN to the destination node called the "sink". One of the most significant challenges pertaining to any WSN is to reduce the energy consumption of its nodes, which run on scarce battery resources. An effective scheme to reduce this energy consumption is to exploit the sink node's mobility, which however presents new challenges to the sink node's routing and information aggregation. In this paper, we propose a new routing and data aggregation scheme based on clustering. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme can provide better energy efficient data aggregation as compared to the KAT (K-means And Traveling salesman path) mobility.