Node utilization index-based data routing and aggregation protocol for energy-efficient wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation using the shortest path is a challenging issue in wireless sensor networks. Data aggregation slows the communication process and consumes many resources available to sensor nodes. So, while transmitting the aggregated data, it is crucial to identify the shortest and most reliable route for energy-efficient data aggregation from the source to the sink node. However, the nodes closer to the sink node are heavily utilized in multi-hop transmission and succumb to early death, which causes energy imbalance and an energy hole problem in the network. To overcome this problem, we propose an innovative node utilization index-based data routing and aggregation (NUIDRA) protocol. The NUIDRA protocol is designed and implemented in two phases. The first phase is to determine the shortest path from the source node to the sink node based on the amount of bandwidth utilized by each sensor node, minimum hop count, node's residual energy, and data aggregation factor. In the second phase, the selected shortest path is used for data transmission and aggregation using the dynamic selection of the aggregator node. The choice of aggregator node is based on the node's utilization index (UI) and adjacent node count from which it receives the data. The NUIDRA protocol is compared and analysed with I-LEACH and QADA protocols. The extensive simulation results show that in the proposed NUIDRA protocol, there is an increase in the average throughput of 70%, packet delivery ratio by 41.93%, and the average latency is reduced by 58.15% as compared to the I-LEACH protocol. Further, there is an increase in the average throughput of 24%, packet delivery ratio by 7.31%, and the average latency is reduced by 53.23% as compared to the QADA protocol for a data packet size of 512 bytes.