A method to enhance lifetime in data aggregation for multi-hop wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks nowadays find wide variety of applications especially in real time. Innovative methods of energy efficient protocols and transmission reduction techniques keep improving to enhance the lifetime of the sensor nodes as they are powered by non-rechargeable batteries. Multi hop transmission and data aggregation are major techniques to reduce the power spent by the sensor node. In this paper, we propose a new ribbon structure for the existing multi hop WSN topologies with modified media access control mechanism called co-operative MAC. The ribbon structure is proposed to reap benefits of PEGASIS and APTEEN protocols. The low power consumption as in PEGASIS is maintained but the number of data packets transmitted is reduced by half. In the proposed scheme, only one of the two nodes along the parallel path involves in data transmission alternating roles in every cycle of aggregation. However, for values sensed above threshold, the inactive node interferes with normal cycle and gets its data transmitted to the sink node. This algorithm is compared with cluster based and chain based protocols and the simulation results show significant energy savings.