Evaluation of energy consumption and delay in different modes of data aggregation for wireless sensor networks

The main challenge in designing a wireless sensor network is the optimization of the energy consumption and the delay in passing the signal from leaf nodes to the base station in different application areas. Examples of sensor networking applications include fire detection, disaster recovery, crowd management and many others. The two parameters; signal delay and energy consumption are very interconnected with a huge tradeoff as trying to control one of them will certainly affect the other adversely. The objective of this paper is to propose a scheme of network architecture where both parameters are optimized resulting in minimum energy consumption and minimum possible signal delay. We propose implementing partial aggregation as opposed to no aggregation or full aggregation. Results obtained from the test carried on an actual network setting have shown that partial aggregation works better compared to the other two techniques.