On the Effects of Aggregation on Reliability in Sensor Networks

Data collected in a sensor network is transported hop-by-hop to a sink for further analysis. The quality of the analysis depends on the amount of data reaching the sink. Hence, data transport reliability influences the quality of the analysis. Data aggregation is a common method used in sensor networks to reduce the amount of messages transported. By aggregating, the data contained in several messages is fused into one single message. Therefore, data aggregation significantly influences the overall data transport reliability observed at the sink. This influence is analyzed and described analytically and by experiment within this paper. Furthermore it is shown how the influence of data aggregation on data transport reliability can be controlled for a particular class of data gathering application