Autonomous data gathering mechanism with transmission reduction for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose an autonomous and energy-efficient data gathering mechanism with transmission reduction for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In our proposed mechanism, sensor nodes schedule their message transmission timing in a self-organizing manner such that they can gather sensor data over a whole WSN and transmit that data to a sink node while switching between a sleep state and an active state. In addition, each sensor node determines the redundancy of its sensor data according to overheard messages so that only necessary sensor data are gathered and transmitted to the sink node. Our proposed mechanism does not require additional control messages and enables both data traffic and control traffic to be drastically reduced. Through simulation experiments, we confirmed that the number of message transmissions can be reduced by up to 77% with our proposed mechanism compared to a conventional mechanism.