An efficient partial data aggregation scheme in WSNs

Highly accurate event detection makes Wireless Sensor Networks popular for real time monitoring applications. Wireless sensor systems that monitor physical and environmental conditions are expected to be deployed with high density, a situation which leads to spatial correlations and redundancy of the collected data. Eliminating these redundancies extends the network lifetime by reducing energy consumption and enhances the velocity of transmitting emergency and periodic messages. In this work, we focus on the scenario where sensors are grouped into clusters. Each Cluster Head (CH) receives samplings from its Cluster Members (CMs), and decides when it should stop sampling, and starts transmitting the resulting packet from the aggregation process in order to reduce the end-to-end delay and ensure the accuracy of the transmitted data. To this end, we propose a cluster based aggregation scheme which determines, at the CH level, the best timing for achieving a short delay, and provides an efficient buffer management strategy for maintaining low energy consumption. Evaluation results based on simulations show that our scheme achieves a good trade-off between energy consumption and end-to-end delay.