Aggregation Protocols for High Rate, Low Delay Data Collection in Sensor Networks

Sensor network applications commonly require sensor data to be periodically collected. Aggregation protocols can make this process considerably more efficient. This paper considers the problem of devising aggregation protocols for applications that must achieve as “real-time” a view of the monitored area as possible, entailing a high sampling rate and a low data collection delay, at the possible cost of some modest amount of data loss. We examine in particular broadcast-based protocols that minimize the number of packet transmissions, relying on multipath delivery rather than ARQ for reliability, and consider the question of whether such protocols can achieve lower collection delays and support higher sampling rates than conventional aggregation protocols. Our results suggest that broadcast-based protocols can yield significantly improved performance in some scenarios, when sensor data can be aggregated into packets of size that is independent (or largely independent) of the number of values being aggregated.