FDAP: Fast data aggregation protocol in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper focuses on data aggregation latency in wireless sensors networks. A distributed algorithm to generate a collision-free schedule for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks is proposed. The proposed algorithm is based on maximal independent sets. It modifies DAS scheme and proposes criteria for node selection amongst available competitors. The selection objective function captures the node degree (number of neighbors) and the level (number of hops) contrary to DAS that simply uses node ID. The proposed solution augments parallel transmissions, which reduces the latency. The time latency of the aggregation schedule generated by the proposed algorithm is also minimized. The latency upper-bound of the schedule is 17R+6Δ+8 time-slots, where R is the network radius and Δ is the maximum node degree. This clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art distributed data aggregation algorithms, whose latency upper-bound is not less than 48R+6Δ+16 time-slots. The proposed protocol is analyzed through a comparative simulation study, where the obtained results confirm the improvement over the existing solutions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.