Performance evaluation of data aggregation schemes in wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation scheme has been widely used to increase the quality of the target information and to reduce the packet transmissions in the sensor network. In this paper, we provide in-depth study results of various data aggregation schemes through the mathematical analysis and simulations. The results show that the performance of aggregation schemes depends on location of targets, node density, network topology, sensing range, hop counts from sources to the sink. When the hop counts from sources to the sink is small and the sensing range of each node is short, tree-based aggregation scheme achieves better performance than other schemes. As the hop counts from sources to the sink and the sensing range of each node increase, dynamic-cluster aggregation achieves significant performance improvement over the other aggregation schemes