A Fast, Adaptive, and Energy-Efficient Data Collection Protocol in Multi-Channel-Multi-Path Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor nodes which can self-organize to relay information such as measurements to a base station. To reduce latency and increase data transmission throughput, multi-channel data collection protocols have been proposed to enable simultaneous parallel transmissions between pairs of nodes within the network. However, the existing protocols require long scheduling phase, are less dynamic to network traffic changes, and/or compromise on efficiency by relying on the back-off mechanism such as carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). This paper proposes a fast, adaptive, and energyefficient data collection protocol in multi-channel-multi-path WSN. The protocol consists of two major phases. The first phase is the node-channel assignment that uses the graph coloring technique to resolve the issue of node overhearing and interference. The second phase is the scheduling and packet forwarding, in which a novel three-dimensional parallel iterative matching (3DPIM) algorithm is proposed to pair up sensor nodes in different time slots so as to enable collision-free multiple simultaneous data transmissions in every time slot. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol can achieve fast and energy-efficient data collection while being adaptive to the change of network traffic in WSN.