Efficient distributed data scheduling algorithm for data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

With the rapid development of applications for wireless sensor networks, efficient data aggregation methods are becoming increasingly emphasized. Many researchers have studied the problem of reporting data with minimum energy cost when data is allowed to be aggregated many times. However, some aggregation functions used to aggregate multiple data into one packet are unrepeatable; that is, every data is aggregated only at most once. This problem motivated us to study reporting data with minimum energy cost subject to that a fixed number of data are allowed to be aggregated into one packet and every data is aggregated at most once. In this paper, we propose novel data aggregation and routing structures for reporting generated data. With the structures, we study the problem of scheduling data to nodes in the networks for data aggregation such that the energy cost of reporting data is minimized, termed MINIMUM ENERGY-COST DATA-AGGREGATION SCHEDULING. In addition, we show that MINIMUM ENERGY-COST DATA-AGGREGATION SCHEDULING is NP-complete. Furthermore, a distributed data scheduling algorithm is proposed accordingly. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm provides a good solution for MINIMUM ENERGY-COST DATA-AGGREGATION SCHEDULING.