Energy Aware Chain based data aggregation scheme for wireless sensor network

A critical issue in wireless sensor networks is to extend the network lifetime by preserving the energy of sensor nodes. A sensor node consumes most of its energy during the data transfer phase. The energy consumed for transmission of data is a thousand times higher than sensing and processing the same amount of data. Data aggregation is a promising technique that is used for minimizing the amount of data transfer in a sensor network, which helps in reducing the energy consumption. The existing data aggregation protocols have focused on objectives like minimizing the energy consumption, maximizing the lifetime of the network and reducing the end to end delay. However, these techniques do not consider duty cycling approach to lower energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an Energy Aware Chain Oriented Sensor Network protocol (EA-COSEN). The proposed protocol is an extension of existing COSEN [1] protocol and it uses duty cycling to save the energy of the sensor nodes. Our simulation results confirm that there is 2% to 3% improvement in throughput, residual energy and delay.