Event-aware Hierarchical Routing with Differential Compression to Extend WSN Lifetime

Wireless sensor networks are popularly used in IoT applications. It is essential to save energy of sensors on reporting data. Though many routing methods have been developed, how to well integrate packet routing with data compression is not much discussed. Hence, we propose an event-aware hierarchical routing with differential compression (EHR-DC) scheme. It groups sensors and selects a cluster head (CH) in each group to manage routing and compression. In normal times, sensors transmit data to their CHs, which are condensed by exploiting spatial correlation. When events appear, sensors adaptively forward data to nearby CHs to raise the efficiency of compression. Through simulations, we show that EHR-DC outperforms other methods in terms of network lifetime and the amount of sensing data retrieved by the sink.