Received: 2 October 2017 Revised: 19 February 2018 Accepted: 19 February 2018 DOI: 10.1002/cpe.4477 RESEARCH ARTICLE A multisensor data fusion strategy for path selection in Internet-of-Things oriented wireless sensor network (WSN) Shishupal Kumar Vijay Kumar Chaurasiya Department of Information Technology, IIIT Allahabad, Allahabad-211 004, India Correspondence Shishupal Kumar, Department of Information Technology, IIIT Allahabad, Allahabad-211 004, India. Email: rsi2016506@iiita.ac.in Summary To give the complete description of an environment or to take a robust decision, a number of observations are collected and combined from multiple sensor nodes. The process of combining and analyzing the observations is called multisensor data fusion. The fusion is used to produce more consistent, accurate, and useful information rather than provided by any individual sensor node. Data fusion finds wide application in many areas of such as object recognition, wireless sen- sor network, image processing, environment mapping, and localization. Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) utilizes wireless sensor network (WSN) as a necessary platform for data sensing and communication. For efficiency, data fusion is performed on the sensed sample collected by the sensor nodes. However, fusion of the network parameters is also essential to select an appro- priate sensor node for the forwarding of data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multisensor data fusion (MDF) strategy that performs fusion of the collected network parameters like band- width and centrality for the selection of an appropriate path. Extensive simulations were made, and related results showed that our proposed scheme has a better performance compared with other schemes in our simulated scenarios. KEYWORDS data fusion, Internet-of-Things, performance analysis, wireless sensor network 1 INTRODUCTION A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a type of network that contains large number of nodes having sensing capability such that they can easily detect any changes in the surrounding real-world environment. The nodes in WSN are used to carry sensed information from one to another desired location for further processing. 1,2 Technological advances are being developed daily, and a WSN plays a rapid contribution for providing smart com- munication with the use of smart devices. These smart devices perform communication at the different locations by providing a level of transparency among users and maintained an interconnected smart network. A number of sensor nodes are constituted by the smart network, which is used to send sensed information and termed as the Internet of Things (IoT). 3 In this paper, we called this network as an IoT oriented WSN. In this network, the users communicate with each other by exchanging of sensed data, monitoring of events, and surrounding and reacting autonomously. 4 The dif- ference between the WSN and IoT oriented WSN is only the few sensors are deployed in WSN rather than along with smart devices for applications. However, the IoT oriented WSN consists of devices having sensors with full network connectivity. The network of IoT oriented WSN is concerned with the loss of packets and performance of the links for achieving high throughput in less delay. The services of IoT oriented WSN are provided by using a standard interface such that users can create a query, retrieve information, and change their states accordingly. An Internet link is used to provide the standard interface between users and IoT devices. The hardware components of a sensor node constitutes with four major devices named as power management module, a sensor, a microcontroller, and a wireless transceiver. 5 As the name indicates, the power management module is used to manage and balance the power needed by a node to perform any task. The sensor in a sensor node is used to sense and collect the surrounding environmental data. Furthermore, the collected information is converted into digital signals and send toward the microcontroller. 6 Concurrency Computat Pract Exper. 2018;e4477. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cpe Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 of 14 https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.4477