Provisioning Fairness for Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

The well-known many-to-one data routing paradigm in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) demands nonuniform medium access and forwarding strategy to achieve the ultimate node level fairness. Since nodes closer to the sink have more traffic than that of far-away nodes, close-by nodes need to employ different frequencies of medium access and forwarding probability such that the sink receives almost equal number of packets from all the nodes in the network. In this paper, we design a distributed fair data collection protocol where the nodes can decide their medium access and packet forwarding strategies within the WSN such that a fair throughput can be enjoyed by each node irrespective of the node′s distance from the sink. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution through simulations and results show that the proposed protocol ensures the fair delivery of packets, improves throughput, and reduces the end-to-end delay for the different WSN scenarios under study.