A delay-efficient algorithm for data aggregation in multihop wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation is a key functionality in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This paper focuses on data aggregation scheduling problem to minimize the delay (or latency). We propose an efficient distributed algorithm that produces a collision-free schedule for data aggregation in WSNs. We theoretically prove that the delay of the aggregation schedule generated by our algorithm is at most 16R+Δ-14 time slots. Here, R is the network radius and Δ is the maximum node degree in the communication graph of the original network. Our algorithm significantly improves the previously known best data aggregation algorithm with an upper bound of delay of 24D+6Δ +16 time slots, where D is the network diameter (note that D can be as large as 2R). We conduct extensive simulations to study the practical performances of our proposed data aggregation algorithm. Our simulation results corroborate our theoretical results and show that our algorithms perform better in practice. We prove that the overall lower bound of delay for data aggregation under any interference model is max {log n, R} where n is the network size. We provide an example to show that the lower bound is (approximately) tight under the protocol interference model when r-I=r, where r-I is the interference range and r is the transmission range. We also derive the lower bound of delay under the protocol interference model when r<r-I<3r and r-I≥3r.