A hybrid approach for clustering-based data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network application for tracking multiple mobile targets, large amounts of sensing data can be generated by a number of sensors. These data must be controlled with efficient data aggregation techniques to reduce data transmission to the sink node. Several clustering methods were used previously to aggregate the large amounts of data produced from sensors in target tracking applications. However, such clustering based data aggregation algorithms show effectiveness only in restricted type of sensing scenarios, while posing great problems when trying to adapt to various environment changes. To alleviate the problems of existing clustering algorithms, we propose a hybrid clustering based data aggregation scheme. The proposed scheme can adaptively choose a suitable clustering technique depending on the status of the network, increasing the data aggregation efficiency as well as energy consumption and successful data transmission ratio. Performance evaluation via simulation has been made to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.