Performance Analysis of Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Mesh Networks

In recent times the interest in wireless sensor mesh networks has grown considerably from personal, to local and metropolitan areas deployment. These networks consist of several mesh routers with minimal mobility and mesh clients that can be either mobile or stationary. The clients may also form a client mesh network among themselves and with routers. The various nodes over the network are interconnected via wireless links which might possibly employ multiple radio interfaces. One major attribute of such networks is the presence of redundant links which removes the single point failure that is present in the classical star or tree networks. Most researches in this field focus on the study of various routing protocols while we sought to introduce the application divisible load theory to find an optimum data aggregation strategy that optimize the networks performance with respect to response time and network delay. We define data aggregation as the process of data sensing and reporting back to the sink nodes, typically routers. The performance of wireless mesh network with 25 sensor nodes is examined by varying network bandwidth and sensing power of sensor nodes. Basic recursive equations for sensing and data reporting are developed for the case of homogeneous and heterogeneous mesh networks and the performance results of two representative data sensing and reporting strategies are presented.