Practical approach to sensor data gathering

Various routing structures have been proposed for the data gathering in wireless sensor networks, which are supposed to be efficient in terms of energy consumption and delivery delay. Unfortunately, most of these structures assume not only a static and stable network environment but also the network-wide information such as global topology. These assumptions lead to intolerable overhead in the construction of a routing structure in many practical scenarios. We present a novel solution termed as Local Parent Designation (LPD), which is mostly based on local information such that each node locally designates its parent in the routing tree. The resultant tree is characterized by each node's local decision on its eligibility to be a parent and priority of designating a parent. While using such minimal resources, LPD is robust to network changes and flexible to various application demands. Moreover, simulation results show that the performance of LPD is comparable to that of other high-cost schemes in terms of energy and delay.