Abstract.This paper presents a comprehensive survey of aggregation techniques that can be used in distributed manner to improve lifetime and energy conservation of wireless sensor networks. These techniques are designed to achieve some improvement objective e.g. reducing data size, minimizing transmission energy, enhancing accuracy etc. Main contribution of this work is proposal of a novel classification of such techniques based on the type of improvement they offer when applied to WSNs. We first review the meaning of term aggregation and then associate it with the proposed classes. Each class is presented with a brief literature review of example applications in WSN.Keywords: Aggregation, wireless sensor networks, data fusion, energy conservation, accuracy
IntroductionWireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are adhoc networks comprising of resource constrained nodes, mostly of small size and low cost, with sensing and communication capabilities. The nodes collect sensor readings and communicate them to sink, mostly outside network, also known as Base Station (BS), via neighbouring nodes. BS processes the data to get conclusions about the state of sensed environment. WSN has been identified as one of the most important technologies of 21st century and has gained popularity due to their applications in social, environmental, military, medical, disaster relief, search and rescue domains. The nature of WSN applications requires nodes to be small and cheap which sets limitations on the available resources and capacity of these nodes. However, irrespective of resource constraints the nodes are bound to handle and transmit large amount of sensed data. Hence, a number of optimization techniques are used to minimize energy consumption, improve bandwidth utilization and increase throughput.Aggregation is one of the common methods used to improve network lifetime in WSNs. Aggregation is a term that has been defined in literature in a number of ways, sometimes synonymously with (data or sensor) fusion. Van Renesse [1] describes aggregation as "… programmable composition of the raw data into less voluminous refined data…". Similarly, it is stated as a combination of data from different sources to eliminate redundancy in [2]. Data fusion has also been defined as the combination of data from multiple sensors to achieve improved accuracy and inferences [3]. However, some researchers choose for a more generic connotation and express the output information of fusion process to be better in 'quality ' [4] or 'some sense' [5]. The criteria of betterment may be qualitative or quantitative.We share this generic view and define aggregation as a process which, when applied on a set of data, results in an output that is an improved representation of input. The improvements are suggested to be in the form of accuracy, completeness, relevance, reliability, energy conservation, efficiency etc. In sensor networks, the input may comprise of data sensed by one sensor, collected over a period, also called temporal aggregation, or from a number of se...