Distributed Collision-Free Data Aggregation Approach for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a distributed serial data aggregation approach, called Spreading Aggregation~(SA), in which one packet hops sequentially over nodes and aggregates their data. The next hop of the aggregation packet is determined locally by each traversed node using only its one-hop neighborhood information, so no network topology information needs to be known by nodes, nor collisions are generated as only one node is communicating at any given time. This localized and distributed characteristic makes the proposed approach highly scalable and very efficient in terms of communication-reduction, energy conservation, and aggregation time, as confirmed by the numerous simulation results we obtained. These results confirm also the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art serial approaches, particularly in very large scale network deployments.