The effect of data aggregation on the performance of a Wireless Sensor Network employing a polling based data collecting technique

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of small devices capable of sensing various variables in the environment, process and communicate them through the network. These devices interact together to carry out monitoring tasks. A photo-voltaic (PV) power plant is an example of such network, where each solar panel has a sensor connected to it. The number of interconnected solar panels can become very large in order to cover a large area. Each sensor senses the output of the panel and sends this value to a central node for processing. In this paper we study and compare the performance of a multi-hop wireless sensor network, employing a polling based data collecting technique with data aggregation, against the performance of a one hop network employing two different data collecting techniques. The study considers a wireless network with fixed number of nodes using different values of the offered load, estimating the network throughput for each technique and offered load. The use of a multi-hop setup was chosen in order to reduce transmission power and interference among nodes. Results show that the multi-hop network, using the polling based data collecting technique with data aggregation, performs close to the one hop network using the other two techniques. The study involves both simulation and testbed experimentation.