Data Fusion by Truncation in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

In a wireless sensor network (WSN), the sensors collect crucial information about the various measurable environmental parameters and efficiently communicate the same to the base station with an objective of preserving integrity as well as reducing communication overhead. As, these sensors are energy constrained which is inherently required for both computation and transmission, it becomes very important to reduce the amount of data that is to be transmitted to the base station. This objective is attained through data aggregation (Patil NS, Patil PR in Data aggregation in wireless sensor network. 2010 [1]). Data aggregation is done in the network to gather, aggregate data, and then further communicate it to the base station by using suitable data aggregation algorithms. Effective aggregation calls for novel technique such as data fusion in order to reduce the amount of data transmitted. The proposed method involves the truncation of the redundant bits of data. It involves dropping down the extra bits of data without losing the actual information, where the empty bits of data are occupied by the bits of the existing data with the cluster head. The work concludes with the comparison of the LEACH protocol with and without data fusion technique on the basis of various measurable parameters, such as total energy consumed, network layer packet size, and application level latency.