A Delay-Aware Scheduling for Data Aggregation in Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is used to reduce the average number of transmissions and to save energy by aggregating multiple packets into a single packet in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Data aggregation scheduling problems have been extensively studied to make sure collision-free packet delivery to a sink node, with the goal of minimizing the aggregation time. Almost all existing data aggregation schemes have a continuous energy consumption problem of RF transceiver because they assume that each node is always in an active state. Recently, the data aggregation scheduling in duty-cycled WSNs is considered to reduce energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a delay-aware data aggregation scheduling scheme to minimize latency in duty-cycled WSNs. In a data aggregation tree construction phase, our proposed scheme constructs Connected Dominating Set (CDS) tree on the shortest path in terms of delay according to an active time slot of each node. The CDS tree is used as virtual backbone for efficient data aggregation. In a scheduling phase, the proposed scheme ensures collision-free data aggregation to the sink with reduced latency by considering data receiving time in each node. The simulation results show that comparing to related work, our proposed scheme can reduce the average time for data aggregation to the sink by 54% and 50% with various node densities and duty cycle respectively.