A STRUCTURE-INDEPENDENT DATA AGGREGATION MECHANISM FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) aim at providing distributed and real-time
information about the physical world in an efficient manner. The limiting factors for
energy efficient data gathering in WSNs are redundancy in sensed data, dynamic
network topology and global information inaccessibility. Data aggregation offers a key
solution to curtail the network load and reduce data transmissions, thereby improving
energy efficiency of WSNs. Many data aggregation protocols have been proposed for
WSNs. However, current state of the art techniques focus on computing and
maintaining a fixed network structure for efficient aggregation, which leads to high
maintenance overheads.