Cluster-chain mobile agent routing algorithm for efficient data aggregation in wireless sensor network

The sensor nodes have limited sensing, computation, communication capabilities and are mostly operated by batteries in a harsh environment with non-replenishable power sources. These restrictions make the sensor network prone to failures because most of the energy is spent on data transmission, sensing, and computing. Many applications such as habitat monitoring, military surveillance and forest fire detection expect the sensor nodes to last for a long time because they operate human unattended. Therefore, the major challenges in designing a wireless sensor network (WSN) are energy conservation, reducing data transmission delay and improving the network lifetime. In this context, data aggregation is an intelligent technique used in WSN, wherein the data from disparate sources are accumulated at intermediate nodes, thereby reducing the number of packets to be sent to the sink. Literature study shows that various routing algorithms are used to perform data aggregation based on the network topology. In order to provide an improved performance amongst the existing, a routing algorithm called cluster-chain mobile agent routing (CCMAR) is proposed in this work. It makes full use of the advantages of both low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and power-efficient gathering in sensor information systems (PEGASIS). CCMAR divides the WSN into a few clusters and runs in two phases.The proposed system is simulated and evaluated for the performance metrics such as energy consumption, transmission delay and network lifetime. The results demonstrate that the proposed CCMAR outperforms LEACH, PEGASIS and other similar routing algorithm, energy efficient cluster-chain based protocol.