Effective Data Gathering and Energy Efficient Communication Protocol in Wireless Sensor Network

Energy efficient data gathering is a common but critical operation in many applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Innovative energy efficient schemes that improve the sensor network lifetime are highly desirable. One of the energy efficient schemes in sensor network is clustering, which is an effective topology control strategy to increase network scalability and lifetime. In this paper we propose effective data gathering and energy efficient clustering scheme (EDGE) which ensures the equal distribution of cluster head responsibility among the sensor nodes and better suits the periodic data gathering applications. Our approach selects cluster head based on three metrics: sensor nodes current energy level, distance to base station and LEACH's probabilistic approach. We also propose two hop communication by selecting one gateway node. We simulate EDGE with two hop communication and without two hop communication. Simulation results shows that our approach significantly improve the network lifetime over Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), LEACH-Centralized (LEACH-C) and Energy-LEACH (E-LEACH) algorithm especially when the first node runs out of energy.