Design of Structure-Free and Energy-Balanced Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Since sensor nodes are energy-constrained, energy saving is a critical issue in wireless sensor networks. By reducing the number of transmissions, data aggregation is an effective approach to save energy. In the literature, most of data aggregation protocols rely on a structured architecture to accomplish the data gathering task. Such structure-based methods suffer from high maintenance overhead in a dynamic environment where sensor nodes may move or fail unexpectedly. In this paper, we propose a structure-free and energy-balanced data aggregation protocol (SFEB). The two-phase aggregation and dynamic aggregator selection of SFEB enable both efficient data gathering and balanced energy consumption. Extensive simulations verify the superiority of our SFEB.