Toward Adaptive Data Aggregation Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Data aggregation has emerged as a basic concept in wireless sensor networks. By combining data and eliminating redundancy, this concept showed its effectiveness in terms of reducing resources consumption. The data aggregation problem is not new and has been widely studied in wireless sensor networks. However, most of the proposed solutions are based on a static data aggregation scheme and do not consider the network constraints evolution such as energy bandwidth, overhead and transmission delay. To dynamically optimize the tradeoff between the data aggregation process and the network constraints, a new paradigm has been introduced recently named the feedback control system. The main idea is to adapt the data aggregation degree to the environment changes and the sensor network applications. The feedback control for data aggregation remains relatively a new research area and only few works have introduced this concept. Therefore this work points out this research field by surveying the different existing protocols.