Dynamic Routing for ADA in Wireless Sensor Networks?

Sensor webs consisting of nodes with limited battery power and wireless communications are deployed to collect useful information from the field[1]. Gathering sensed information in an energy efficient manner is critical to operating the sensor network for a long period of time. Data collection problem is defined where, in a round of communication, each sensor node has a packet to be sent to the distant base station. There is some fixed amount of energy cost in the electronics when transmitting or receiving a packet and a variable cost when transmitting a packet which depends on the distance of transmission. If each node transmits its sensed data directly to the base station, then it will deplete its power quickly. Data aggregation[3][5] has been widely recognized as an efficient method to reduce energy consumption[4] in wireless sensor networks, which can support a wide range of applications such as monitoring temperature[4], 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. Following this paradigm, numerous data aggregation schemes [6], [7], [8],[9],[10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [7], [18] have been proposed to save the limited energy on sensor nodes in WSNs. In this paper, we take the lead in introducing packet attribute into data aggregation and propose an Attributeaware Data Aggregation(ADA) mechanism using Dynamic Routing which can make packets with the same attribute convergent as much as possible and therefore improve the efficiency of data aggregation.