Integrated channel assignment and data aggregation routing problem in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, data aggregation routing could reduce the number of data transmission so as to achieve efficient total energy consumption. However, this kind of data aggregation introduces data retransmission that is caused by co-channel interference from neighbouring sensor nodes. Hence, more data aggregation leads to more extra energy consumption and significant retransmission delay from retransmission. This could jeopardise the benefits of data aggregation. One possible solution to circumvent retransmission caused by co-channel interference is to assign different channel to every sensor node that is within each other's interference range on the data aggregation tree. As the number of non-overlapping channels is limited in wireless networks, it is unlikely that we could assign a different channel to every sensor node on the data aggregation tree. Then, an interesting problem is to perform data aggregation routing in conjunction with channel assignment to minimise total transmission power under limited number of non-overlapping channels. This problem is an NP-complete problem. We devise heuristic algorithm, Iterative Channel Adjustment Data Aggregation Routing algorithm (ICADAR), and other three heuristics, to tackle this problem. From the simulation results, the ICADAR algorithm outperforms the other three algorithms under all experimental cases.