Attribute-Aware Data Aggregation Using Potential-Based Dynamic Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

The resources especially energy in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are quite limited. Since sensor nodes are usually much dense, data sampled by sensor nodes have much redundancy, data aggregation becomes an effective method to eliminate redundancy, minimize the number of transmission, and then to save energy. Many applications can be deployed in WSNs and various sensors are embedded in nodes, the packets generated by heterogenous sensors or different applications have different attributes. The packets from different applications cannot be aggregated. Otherwise, most data aggregation schemes employ static routing protocols, which cannot dynamically or intentionally forward packets according to network state or packet types. The spatial isolation caused by static routing protocol is unfavorable to data aggregation. To make data aggregation more efficient, in this paper, we introduce the concept of packet attribute, defined as the identifier of the data sampled by different kinds of sensors or applications, and then propose an attribute-aware data aggregation (ADA) scheme consisting of a packet-driven timing algorithm and a special dynamic routing protocol. Inspired by the concept of potential in physics and pheromone in ant colony, a potential-based dynamic routing is elaborated to support an ADA strategy. The performance evaluation results in series of scenarios verify that the ADA scheme can make the packets with the same attribute spatially convergent as much as possible and therefore improve the efficiency of data aggregation. Furthermore, the ADA scheme also offers other properties, such as scalable with respect to network size and adaptable for tracking mobile events.