Universal Steiner Trees for Data Aggregation in Low Doubling Metrics

We describe a novel approach for constructing a single spanning tree for data aggregation towards a sink node which we call as Universal Steiner Tree (UST). The tree is universal in the sense that it is static and independent of the number of data sources and fusioncosts at intermediate nodes. The tree construction is in polynomial time, and for low doubling dimension topologies it guarantees a O(log n)approximation of the optimal aggregation cost. With constant fusioncost functions our aggregation tree gives a O(log n)-approximation for every Steiner tree to the sink.