Directed Diffusion (DD), uses mechanisms such as data aggregation and in-network processing to suppress the additional data overhead however there is no guarantee that paths from nearby sources join after a few hops. Also for path construction, each source floods a distinct exploratory data (ED) packet through the network which is not necessary for nearby sources. In this paper an efficient data-gathering protocol (EDAP) is proposed to address the problems of late-aggregation and distinct ED-flooding through using a virtual sink (VS) node nearby the sources which plays the role of sink node and broadcasts local interest messages and routed gathered data toward destination. Also in this protocol, multiple paths are constructed between virtual sink and the sink node which leads to load-balancing and increase in the life-time of the network nodes. Our routing protocol can produce more than one disjoint or braided path and spread the gathered data properly between constructed paths according to their length and remaining energy. Simulation results shows that in this way a significant amount of energy can be saved and the network lifetime will be increased considerably (up to 75% better than DD).

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