Energy-efficient routing for correlated data in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we investigate the reduction in the total energy consumption of wireless sensor networks using multi-hop data aggregation by constructing energy-efficient data aggregation trees. We propose an adaptive and distributed routing algorithm for correlated data gathering and exploit the data correlation between nodes using a game theoretic framework. Routes are chosen to minimize the total energy expended by the network using best response dynamics to local data. The cost function that is used for the proposed routing algorithm takes into account energy, interference and in-network data aggregation. The iterative algorithm is shown to converge in a finite number of steps. Simulations results show that multi-hop data aggregation can significantly reduce the total energy consumption in the network. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.