Alternating multiple tributaries + deltas

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of trading off the latency in delivering the answer to the sink at the benefit of balancing the spatial dispersion of the energy consumption among the nodes and, consequently, prolonging the lifetime in sensor networks. Typically, in response to a query that pertains to the data from some geographic region, a tree structure is constructed and, when possible, some in-network aggregation is performed. On the other hand, in order to increase the robustness and/or balance the load, multipath routing is employed. Motivated by earlier work that combined trees and multipaths [19], in this paper we explore the possibility, and the impact, of combining multiple trees and multiple multipaths for routing, when processing a query with respect to a given region of interest. We present and evaluate two approaches that enable load-balancing in terms of alternating among a collection of routing structures.