Energy-efficient Channel Allocation based Data Aggregation for Intertidal Wireless Sensor Networks

The intertidal area serves as a harsh habitat for marine organisms, and monitoring the environmental conditions in such an area with a wireless sensor network (IT-WSN) provides first-hand materials for researchers to explore the impact of global climate changes. Our observations in an IT-WSN reveal that the unbalanced energy consumptions among relay nodes and leaf nodes shorten the system lifespan significantly. Moreover, the packet burst phenomenon caused by the tidal period makes the condition even worse. To mitigate the problem, we propose EDA, an energy-efficient channel allocation based data aggregation for the IT-WSN. EDA first designs an adaptive cycle period mechanism for nodes to save unnecessary energy waste and proposes a constructive-interference-based channel allocation scheme. We evaluate EDA with a trace-driven large-scale simulation testbed, and the results demonstrate that EDA can significantly reduce the energy consumption of all nodes, especially the relay node.