Distributed Aggregation Algorithms for Mobile Sensor Networks with Group Mobility Model

In many applications of mobile sensor networks, such as water flow monitoring and disaster rescue, the nodes in the network can move together or separate temporarily. The dynamic network topology makes traditional spanning-tree-based aggregation algorithms invalid in mobile sensor networks. In this paper, we first present a distributed clustering algorithm which divides mobile sensor nodes into several groups, and then propose two distributed aggregation algorithms, Distance-AGG (Aggregation based on Distance), and Probability-AGG (Aggregation based on Probability). Both of these two algorithms conduct an aggregation query in three phases: query dissemination, intra-group aggregation, and inter-group aggregation. These two algorithms are efficient especially in mobile networks. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms in terms of aggregation accuracy, energy efficiency, and query delay through ns-2 simulations. The results show that Distance-AGG and Probability-AGG can obtain higher accuracy with lower transmission and query delay than the existing aggregation algorithms.