A Scalable Scheme for Preventing Feedback Implosion in a Large-Scale Multi-Tier Sensor Network

We consider a huge hierarchical sensor network consisting of millions of sensors arranged in clusters for scalability and cost-performance. We address the problem of how a centralized gateway can estimate the number of sensors affected by a certain event. We propose a scheme for solving this problem in the most efficient way in terms of communication cost, and a complete mathematical analysis of the estimation error. We show that the error of the new scheme is very small even if the number of sensors experiencing an event is several million.