ERP-DDA: Event Reporting Protocol Based on Distributed Data Aggregation for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a wide range of applications in human life. Accordingly, WSNs have been
thoroughly considered in research community to improve their performance and address their challenges. Event
reporting in WSNs has always been a major challenge in terms of energy consumption. Event reporting requires
sensing the event and sending a reporting packet from the sensor to the centralized base station (BS). However,
sensor’s energy is limited and stored in a non-rechargeable battery. Therefore, several event-reporting (or data
collection) protocols have been proposed to improve energy consumption in WSNs, and consequently, to extend
their lifetime. In this paper, we propose an efficient event reporting protocol for WSNs called Event Reporting
Protocol Based on Distributed Data Aggregation (ERP-DDA). This protocol mainly aims at reporting any event by
no more than one sensor node such that energy saving is satisfied in the whole network. To achieve this goal, ERPDDA
is mainly based on the following features: it is a cluster-based protocol, it is a multi-hop routing protocol, it
applies distributed data aggregation, and it employs variable clustering and cluster head selection. Simulations
show that ERP-DDA significantly extends the lifetime of WSNs compared with other related protocols.