In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), the deployed sensor
nodes can sense the same measures from the monitored
area and forward these redundant measures to the sink
node. Although redundant measures provide better
accuracy but consume a lot of energy during the
communication and the processing at the node and the sink,
and thus decrease the lifetime of the WSN. Therefore, the
elimination of redundant measures and reducing the
communication cost are considered as essential
characteristics during design the WSNs. In this article, a
Distributed Data Aggregation (DiDA) protocol for
prolonging the lifetime of WSNs is suggested. DiDA
protocol is an energy efficient approach for a clustered
network. DiDA works into cycles and each cycle
aggregates and reduces data dimensionality by using an
Adaptive Piecewise Constant Approximation (APCA)
method. DiDA was successfully evaluated using
OMNeT++ network simulator and based on sensed data of
a real sensor network. Percentage of Sent data to the Cluster
Head (CH), data accuracy, and energy consumption are the
performance metrics applied to assess the effectiveness of
the DiDA protocol. The conducted simulation results show
that the proposed DiDA protocol decreases the consumed
energy and extending the network lifetime, in comparison
with a method without using data aggregation technique,
whilst keeping the sensed data quality at the sink node.