Attribute-aware data aggregation using dynamic routing in wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation has been widely recognized as an efficient method to reduce energy consumption in wireless sensor networks, which can support a wide range of applications such as monitoring temperature, humidity, level, speed etc. The data sampled by the same kind of sensors have much redundancy since the sensor nodes are usually quite dense in wireless sensor networks. To make data aggregation more efficient, the packets with the same attribute, defined as the identifier of different data sampled by different sensors such as temperature sensors, humidity sensors, etc., should be gathered together. However, to the best of our knowledge, present data aggregation mechanisms did not take packet attribute into consideration. In this paper, we take the lead in introducing packet attribute into data aggregation and propose an Attribute-aware Data Aggregation mechanism using Dynamic Routing (ADADR) which can make packets with the same attribute convergent as much as possible and therefore improve the efficiency of data aggregation. This goal cannot be achieved by present static routing schemes employed in most of data aggregation mechanisms since they construct routes before transmitting the sampled data and thus can not dynamically forward packets in response to the variation of packets at intermediate nodes. Hence, we present a potential-based dynamic routing scheme which employs the concept of potential in physics and pheromone in ant colony to achieve our goal. The results of simulations in series of scenarios show that ADADR indeed conserve energy by reducing the average number of transmissions each packet needs to reach the sink and is scalable with regard to the network size.