EDAP: An Efficient Data-Gathering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Directed Diffusion (DD) uses data aggregation to suppress data overhead however there is no guarantee that paths from nearby sources join after a few hops. In this paper, an efficient data-gathering protocol (EDAP) is proposed to address this problem by using a Virtual Sink (VS) node nearby the sources, which plays the role of sink node and broadcasts local interest messages and routes gathered data toward destination. Also, multiple paths are constructed between VS and the sink node, which leads to load-balancing, and increase in the lifetime of the network. Simulation results show that in EDAP a significant amount of energy can be saved and the network lifetime will be increased considerably.