Using central nodes for efficient data collection in wireless sensor networks

We study the problem of data collection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). A typical WSN is composed of wireless sensor nodes that periodically sense data and forward it to the base station in a multi-hop fashion. We are interested in designing an efficient data collection tree routing, focusing on three optimization objectives: energy efficiency, transport capacity, and hop-diameter (delay). In this paper we develop single- and multi-hop data collection, which are based on the definition of node centrality: centroid nodes. We provide theoretical performance analysis for our approach, present its distributed implementation and discuss the different aspects of using it. Most of our results are for two-dimensional WSNs, however we also show that the centroid-based approach is asymptotically optimal in three-dimensional random node deployments. In addition, we present new construction for arbitrary network deployment based on central nodes selection. We also present extensive simulation results that support our theoretical findings.