Due to limited resources in wireless sensor nodes, energy efficiency is considered as one of the primary constraints in the design of the topology of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Since data that are collected by wireless sensor nodes exhibit the characteristics of temporal association, data fusion has also become a very important means of reducing network traffic as well as eliminating data redundancy as far as data transmission is concerned. Another reason for data fusion is that, in many applications, only some of the data that are collected can meet the requirements of the sink node. In this paper, we propose a method to calculate the number of cluster heads or data aggregators during data fusion based on the rate-distortion function. In our discussion, we will first establish an energy consumption model and then describe a method for calculating the number of cluster heads from the point of view of reducing energy consumption. We will also show through theoretical analysis and experimentation that the network topology design based on the rate-distortion function is indeed more energy-efficient.
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