An analytical study of central and in-network data processing for wireless sensor networks

This paper compares the performance of centralized and in-network data processing for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) under various deployment conditions on the real sensor hardware Sun SPOT from Sun Microsystems. We define several criteria to measure the quality of responses in WSN applications. Guided by an extensive experimental study, we discuss in detail the performance impacts of different deployment factors on algorithms that implement both centralized and in-network computing. Finally, performance guidelines are given to algorithm designers for WSN applications.