Medians and Beyond: New Aggregation Techniques for Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large geographical areas inexpensively. Sensors, however, have significant power constraint (battery life), making communication very expensive. Another important issue in the context of sensor-based information systems is that individual sensor readings are inherently unreliable. In order to address these two aspects, sensor database systems like TinyDB and Cougar enable in-network data aggregation to reduce the communication cost and improve reliability. The existing data aggregation techniques, however, are limited to relatively simple types of queries such as SUM, COUNT, AVG, and MIN/MAX. In this paper we propose a data aggregation scheme that significantly extends the class of queries that can be answered using sensor networks. These queries include (approximate) quantiles, such as the median, the most frequent data values, such as the consensus value, a histogram of the data distribution, as well as range queries. In our scheme, each sensor aggregates the data it has received from other sensors into a fixed (user specified) size message. We provide strict theoretical guarantees on the approximation quality of the queries in terms of the message size. We evaluate the performance of our aggregation scheme by simulation and demonstrate its accuracy, scalability and low resource utilization for highly variable input data sets

Optimized Data Aggregation Method for Time, Privacy and Effort Reduction in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained wide application in recent years, such as in intelligent transportation system, medical care, disaster rescue, structure health monitoring and so on. In these applications, since WSNs are multi-hop networks, and the sink nodes of WSNs require to gather every sensor node’s data, data aggregation is emerging as a critical function for WSNs. Reducing the latency of data aggregation attracts much research because many applications are event urgent. Data aggregation is ubiquitous in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Much work investigates how to reduce the data aggregation latency. This paper considers the data aggregation method based on optimization of required time, maintain privacy while keeping lesser efforts by data aggregation in a wireless sensor network (WSN) and propose a method for the solution of the problem

An objective based classification of aggregation techniques for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have gained immense popularity in recent years due to their ever increasing capabilities and wide range of critical applications. A huge body of research efforts has been dedicated to find ways to utilize limited resources of these sensor nodes in an efficient manner. One of the common ways to minimize energy consumption has been aggregation of input data. We note that every aggregation technique has an improvement objective to achieve with respect to the output it produces. Each technique is designed to achieve some target e.g. reduce data size, minimize transmission energy, enhance accuracy etc. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of aggregation techniques that can be used in distributed manner to improve lifetime and energy conservation of wireless sensor networks. Main contribution of this work is proposal of a novel classification of such techniques based on the type of improvement they offer when applied to WSNs. Due to the existence of a myriad of definitions of aggregation, we first review the meaning of term aggregation that can be applied to WSN. The concept is then associated with the proposed classes. Each class of techniques is divided into a number of subclasses and a brief literature review of related work in WSN for each of these is also presented