A Continuous Enhancement Routing Solution aware of Data Aggregation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of hundreds or thousands of nodes with limited energy resources. Due to the high density of nodes in this kind of network, redundant data will be detected by nearby nodes. Since the network lifetime is a key issue in wireless sensor networks, in-network data aggregation can be exploited in order to reduce the number of messages exchanged and consequently reduce the energy consumption. Although there are many data aggregation solutions in wireless sensor networks, most of them leads to low quality routing trees and does not address the load balancing problem, since the same tree is used throughout the network life. To tackle these challenges we propose a Continuous Enhancement Routing Solution named as CER, an approach for computing increasingly better routing trees. CER was extensively compared to three other known solutions: the Shortest Path Tree (SPT), Data Aggregation Aware Routing Protocol (DAARP) and Dynamic Data Aggregation Aware Routing Protocol (DDAARP). The obtained results show that CER outperforms these solutions in all evaluations performed.