A Cluster-Based Data Gathering Protocol in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

The most important issue in designing a data gathering algorithm is how to save energy of sensor nodes while meeting the requirement of application such as sensing are coverage. On the other hand, in the real applications, it is unrealistic to guarantee all sensors have the same energy because they have different energy consumption. In this paper, A cluster based data gathering protocol for heterogeneous energy WSNs (EDGA) is proposed. EDGA achieves a good performance in terms of lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for in-network communications and balancing the energy load. EDGA improves the cluster-based LEACH data gathering protocol, and adopts the weighted election probabilities of each node to handle the heterogeneous energy WSN. Moreover, it also introduces a simple but efficient approach to solve the intra-cluster coverage problem. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed EDGA significantly outperforms LEACH, HEED in terms of network lifetime and the amount of data gathered in the heterogeneous energy network.