Data aggregation routing protocols in wireless sensor networks: a taxonomy

Routing in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) aims to interconnect sensor nodes via single or multi-hop paths. The routes are established to forward data packets from sensor nodes to the sink. Establishing a single path to report each data packet results in increasing energy consumption in WSN, hence, data aggregation routing is used to combine data packets and consequently reduce the number of transmissions. This reduces the routing overhead by eliminating redundant and meaningless data. There are two models for data aggregation routing in WSN: mobile agent and client/server. This paper describes data aggregation routing and classifies then the routing protocols according to the network architecture and routing models. The key issues of the data aggregation routing models (client/server and mobile agent) are highlighted and discussed.