A Fuzzy Data Fusion Solution to Enhance the QoS and the Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are formed of various nodes that gather parameters in a monitored environment. These nodes interact with each other or can be arranged into clusters controlled by a cluster head that has the task of rerouting the acquired data to a base station. Both the Quality of Service (QoS) and low data quality are common issues in WSNs, mainly prompted by the data fusion mechanism, where a certain amount of low-quality data may affect the overall fusion result negatively. In this paper, a fuzzy-based solution for data fusion in WSNs is presented to provide a better QoS and to reduce the energy consumption. The suggested approach can aggregate only true value rather than process the full data. This purpose is accomplished thanks to a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) implemented within nodes. Besides, the data, which have been separated, are aggregated by a cluster head which also has the responsibility of determining the probability that an event has happened in the monitored environment. Finally, the base station estimates whether an event has occurred and, eventually, raises an appropriate alarm. The results of a real testbed scenario reveal that the proposed method achieves encouraging performance.