Research on the Influence of Data Fusion on Clustering Lifespan in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper deals with influence of the fusion of part of the related data in WSN on the energy consumption of network clustering based on the hypothesis that the data packets transmitted by cluster-head node after data fusion are the minimum with the rate distortion function theory. The study shows that node energy consumption largely depends on its location: although some nodes are comparatively distant from the sink node, they are likely to consume more energy. The study results further show that there is a trade-off between the total energy consumption of the networks and the network lifespan, i.e. even if the total energy consumption of the networks reaches its minimum, the network lifespan is not necessarily the longest.