Capacity of Data Collection in Arbitrary Wireless Sensor Networks

How to efficiently collect sensing data from all sensor nodes is critical to the performance of wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we aim to understand the theoretical limitations of data collection in terms of possible and achievable maximum capacity. Previously, the study of data collection capacity has only concentrated on large-scale random networks. However, in most of practical sensor applications, the sensor network is not deployed uniformly and the number of sensors may not be as huge as in theory. Therefore, it is necessary to study the capacity of data collection in an arbitrary network. In this paper, we derive the upper and constructive lower bounds for data collection capacity in arbitrary networks. The proposed data collection method can lead to order-optimal performance for any arbitrary sensor networks. We also examine the design of data collection under a general graph model and discuss performance implications.