ZDG: Energy efficient zone based data gathering in a wireless sensor network

In a WSN, it is desirable to keep many sensors active to collect data as much as possible which causes network failure, on the other hand, if most of the sensors are asleep, enough data can not be collected. Therefore, the trade-off between data collection and energy saving has made data gathering an interesting research field. To handle these challenges, we present an energy efficient data gathering method which increases the network lifetime and a good throughput. In our research, the tasks of data collection are distributed among the nodes of the different zones which resist the sensor nodes from going to the bottleneck state by minimizing latency. We design a load balanced data collection scheme by dividing the network zone into on-demand data collection clusters and routes which ultimately provides higher packet delivery. We find that our method provides longer network lifetime and higher throughput compared to some commonly used methods.