A cluster-tree based data gathering algorithm for wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a lot of tiny sensing devices, which can monitor environment or other events. Because these devices run on battery, energy is an extremely critical resource for them. Thus, energy-efficient method need be carefully designed for data gathering. Most of the existing energy-efficient algorithms always forward packets by clusters or tree. Both the structure of clustering and tree can realize to gather data with energy-efficient method. In this paper, considering the concept of clustering and tree, we proposed a cluster-tree data gathering algorithm (CTDGA) to reduce the energy consumption when a WSN is used to gather data. In CTDGA, the goal of this basic approach is to use the architecture of cluster to gather data from the nodes sensed interesting event to the cluster-head (CH) so as to reduce the transmission energy in a cluster. Then, a special CH is responsible for gathering data from other CHs and transferred the data to sink node by the architecture of tree so as to protect the CHs with relatively low residual energy. Our simulation results show that CTDGA can improve energy efficiency, and thus prolong network lifetime.