• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.5-24
• /
• 2010

Data fusion is an attractive technology because it allows various trade-offs related to performance metrics, e.g., energy, latency, accuracy, fault-tolerance and security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Under a complicated environment, each sensor node must be equipped with more than one type of sensor module to monitor multi-targets, so that the complexity for the fusion process is increased due to the existence of various physical attributes. In this paper, we first investigate the process and performance of multi-attribute fusion in data gathering of WSNs, and then propose a self-adaptive threshold method to balance the different change rates of each attributive data. Furthermore, we present a method to measure the energy-conservation efficiency of multi-attribute fusion. Based on our proposed methods, we design a novel energy equilibrium routing method for WSNs, viz., multi-attribute fusion tree (MAFT). Simulation results demonstrate that MAFT achieves very good performance in terms of the network lifetime.