Broadening the Concept of Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy is scarce in sensor nodes. Therefore wireless sensor networks aim to transmit as few packets as possible. An often used technique is to aggregate data coming from multiple sensor nodes into a single packet. In this paper, we broaden this approach so that control information can also be sent together with other (control) information. The benefits of this broadened aggregation approach are discussed, and we give several examples of this generalized aggregation view. We also provide a classification for different aggregation techniques. Furthermore, we define an architecture that supports some of the techniques that were proposed and prove mathematically that even simple techniques can significantly reduce the number of sent packets. Finally, several open issues are identified, and future research directives are given.