An Energy-Aware Protocol for Data Gathering Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data gathering is a major function of many applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The most important issue in designing a data gathering algorithm is how to save energy of sensor nodes while meeting the requirement of applications/users such as sensing area coverage. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical clustering protocol for long-lived sensor network. EAP achieves a good performance in terms of lifetime by minimizing energy consumption for in-network communications and balancing the energy load among all nodes. EAP introduces a new clustering parameter for cluster head election, which can better handle the heterogeneous energy capacities.