On the interaction between data aggregation and topology control in wireless sensor networks

• Published in: 2004 First Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2004. IEEE SECON 2004 pp. 557 - 565
• Main Authors: Erramilli, V., Malta, I., Bestavros, A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2004
• Subjects: Analytical models; Delay; Energy consumption; Energy resources; Measurement; Network topology; Routing; Sensor fusion; Sensor phenomena and characterization; Wireless sensor networks
• ISBN: 0780387961; 9780780387966
• DOI: 10.1109/SAHCN.2004.1381958

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by limited energy resources. To conserve energy, application-specific aggregation (fusion) of data reports from multiple sensors can be beneficial in reducing the amount of data flowing over the network. Furthermore, controlling the topology by scheduling the activity of nodes between active and sleep modes has often been used to uniformly distribute the energy consumption among all nodes by de-synchronizing their activities. We present an integrated analytical model to study the joint performance of in-network aggregation and topology control. We define performance metrics that capture the tradeoffs among delay, energy, and fidelity of the aggregation. Our results indicate that to achieve high fidelity levels under medium to high event reporting load, shorter and fatter aggregation/routing trees (toward the sink) offer the best delay-energy tradeoff as long as topology control is well coordinated with routing.