A QoS Aware Framework to Support Minimum Energy Data Aggregation and Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), the sensor nodes obtain data and communicate its data to a centralized node called base station (BS) using intermediate gateway nodes (GN). Because sensors are battery powered, they are highly energy constrained. Data aggregation can be used to combine data of several sensors into a single message, thus reducing sensor communication costs and energy consumption. In this article, the authors propose a QoS aware framework to support minimum energy data aggregation and routing in WSNs. To minimize the energy consumption, a new metric is defined for the evaluation of the path constructed from source to destination. The proposed QoS framework supports the dual goal of load balancing and serving as an admission control mechanism for incoming traffic at a particular sensor node. The results show that the proposed framework supports data aggregation with less energy consumption than earlier strategies.