Energy-Based Connected Dominating Set for Data Aggregation for Intelligent Wireless Sensor Networks

The main mission of deploying sensors is data collection and the main sensor resource to save is energy. For this reason, data aggregation is an important method to maximize sensors’ lifetime. Aggregating sensed data from multiple sensors eliminates the redundant transmissions and provides fused information to the sink. It has been proved in the literature that a structure based data aggregation gives better results in terms of packet delivery and energy saving which prolong the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Distributed Connected Dominating Set for Data Aggregation (DCDSDA) to construct our network topology. The sensors of the network compute in a distributed way and based on the residual energy of each sensor, a connected dominating set to form a virtual backbone. This backbone forms a tree topology and as it is computed and maintained in a distributed way based on predefined energy constraints, it represents an intelligent fault tolerance mechanism to maintain our network and to deal with packet loss. The simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods.