An approach for near-optimal distributed data fusion in wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Damianos Gavalas;Aristides Mpitziopoulos;Grammati Pantziou;Charalampos Konstantopoulos

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Lesvos, Greece;Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Lesvos, Greece;Department of Informatics, Technological Educational Institution of Athens, Athens, Greece;Department of Informatics, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece

  • Venue:
  • Wireless Networks
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), a lot of sensory traffic with redundancy is produced due to massive node density and their diverse placement. This causes the decline of scarce network resources such as bandwidth and energy, thus decreasing the lifetime of sensor network. Recently, the mobile agent (MA) paradigm has been proposed as a solution to overcome these problems. The MA approach accounts for performing data processing and making data aggregation decisions at nodes rather than bring data back to a central processor (sink). Using this approach, redundant sensory data is eliminated. In this article, we consider the problem of calculating near-optimal routes for MAs that incrementally fuse the data as they visit the nodes in a WSN. The order of visited nodes (the agent's itinerary) affects not only the quality but also the overall cost of data fusion. Our proposed heuristic algorithm adapts methods usually applied in network design problems in the specific requirements of sensor networks. It computes an approximate solution to the problem by suggesting an appropriate number of MAs that minimizes the overall data fusion cost and constructs near-optimal itineraries for each of them. The performance gain of our algorithm over alternative approaches both in terms of cost and task completion latency is demonstrated by a quantitative evaluation and also in simulated environments through a Java-based tool.