Optimal Policies for Distributed Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract— We consider the scenario of distributed data aggregation in wireless sensor networks, where each sensor can obtain and estimate the information of the whole sensing field through local data exchange and aggregation. The intrinsic trade-off between energy and delay in aggregation operations imposes a crucial question on nodes to decide optimal instants for forwarding their samples. The samples could be composed of their own sensor readings or an aggregation of information with other samples forwarded from neighboring nodes. By considering the randomness of the sample arrival instants and the uncertainty of the availability of the multi-access communication channel due to the asynchronous nature of information exchange among neighboring nodes, we propose a decision process model to analyze this problem and determine the optimal decision policies at nodes with local information. We show that, once the statistics of the sample arrival and the availability of the channel satisf...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Zhenzhen Ye, Alhussein A. Abouzeid, Jing Ai
• Keywords: Aggregation Operations, Communications, Data Aggregation, INFOCOM 2007, Sample Arrival