Approaching the Optimal Schedule for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the large-scale ad hoc deployments and wireless interference, data aggregation is a fundamental but time consuming task in wireless sensor networks. This paper focuses on the latency of data aggregation. Previously, it has been proved that the problem of minimizing the latency of data aggregation is NP-hard [1]. Using maximum independent set and first fit algorithms, in this study we design a scheduling algorithm, Peony-tree-based Data Aggregation (PDA), which has a latency bound of 15R + Delta - 15, where R is the network radius (measured in hops) and Delta is the maximum node degree. We theoretically analyze the performance of PDA based on different network models, and further evaluate it through extensive simulations. Both the analytical and simulation results demonstrate the advantages of PDA over the state-of-art algorithm in [2], which has a latency bound of 23R + Delta - 18.