HEAP: A Hierarchical Energy Aware Protocol for Routing and Aggregation in Sensor Networks

Applications requiring monitoring such as medical and habitat monitoring, pose a great challenge to sensor network protocols. Power consumption in wireless sensor networks is largely constrained in each node of the network due to the size and the availability of the energy resources. Therefore, having an enhanced scheme that can save transmission energy is ideal. This paper presents an energy efficient and fault tolerant algorithm for routing in wireless sensor networks, which meets sensor networks requirements for monitoring systems that huge amount of events are sensed in them. The algorithm constructs a hierarchy tree over the network and maintains the distribution of energy by restructuring the hierarchy tree over time. The proposed idea was implemented using PARSEC and compared to the HPEQ protocol. Evaluations showed that the proposed algorithm is proper solution for systems with high amount of data sensed because of efficient energy distribution in the network and the ability to aggregate iterative data hierarchically.