Efficient Data Gathering Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Microsensor nodes, charged with battery power and capable of wireless communications, are distributed around to survey the environments and send the needed data to the base station periodically. The limited energy resources are consumed in both communication and computation – especially in communication. To reduce such power consumption, this paper presents a new data gathering scheme based on the hypercube topology for microsensor networks. By gathering data from all nodes to the base station through the communication tree in the constructed hypercube, the new scheme is able to shorten communication delay by parallel transmissions and to replace dead nodes through reconfiguration. Simulation results show that compared with other data gathering schemes, the proposed hypercube-based scheme brings up favorable results, including reduced transmission delay, balanced energy loads, satisfying system scalability and as a result prolonged system lifetime. To complete our investigation, the distributed approach for constructing a hypercube and a binary tree for data gathering are also proposed.