Distributed Minimum Energy Data Gathering and Aggregation in Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose an effective distributed algorithm to solve the minimum energy data gathering (MEDG) problem in wireless sensor networks. The problem objective is to find an optimal transmission structure on the network graph, such that the total energy consumed by the sensor nodes is minimized. We formulate the problem as a non-linear optimization problem. The formulation considers in-network data aggregation and respects the capacity of the wireless shared-medium. We apply Lagrangian dualization technique on this formulation to obtain a subgradient algorithm for computing the optimal transmission structure. The subgradient algorithm is asynchronous and amenable to fully distributed implementations, which corresponds to the decentralized nature of sensor networks.