An Energy Efficient Load Balancing Tree-Based Data Aggregation Scheme for Grid-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a very large number of sensors which are deployed in the specific area of interest. A sensor is an electronic device equipped with a small processor and has a small-capacity memory. The WSN has the functions of low cost, easy deployment, and random reconfiguration. In this paper, an energy-efficient load balancing tree-based data aggregation scheme (LB-TBDAS) for grid-based WSNs is proposed. In this scheme, the sensing area is partitioned into many cells of a grid and then the sensor node with the maximum residual energy is elected to be the cell head in each cell. Then, the tree-like path is established by using the minimum spanning tree algorithm. In the tree construction, it must meet the three constraints, which are the minimum energy consumption spanning tree, the network depth, and the maximum number of child nodes. In the data transmission process, the cell head is responsible for collecting the sensing data in each cell, and the collected data are transmitted along the tree-like path to the base station (BS). Simulation results show that the total energy consumption of LB-TBDAS is significantly less than that of GB-PEDAP and PEDAP. Compared to GB-PEDAP and PEDAP, the proposed LB-TBDAS extends the network lifetime by more than 100%. The proposed LB-TBDAS can avoid excessive energy consumption of sensor nodes during multi-hop data transmission and can also avoid the hotspot problem of WSNs.