DA-DCT: Data Aggregation Using Discrete Cosine Transform in Wireless Sensor Networks

A recent trend in the data aggregation research is to utilize an optimal or suboptimal tree. These approaches, however, have high computational complexity, and the tree must be reconstructed whenever the topology changes. To avoid this overhead, the proposed method does not use any data aggregation tree. In our method, each sensor sends aggregated data with an aggregation period and receive buffer size computed by itself leveraging DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) analysis. Based on the DCT analysis of packet arrival rate, sensors select the period and buffer size that are suitable for themselves. Finally, a simple simulation is used to assess the usefulness of DCT in WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks). The simulation results show that the proposed method decreases the number of transmissions by about 70 percent without much overhead.