Fast Aggregation Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data aggregation is a key, yet time-consuming functionality introduced to conserve energy in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, to minimize time latency, we focus on aggregation scheduling problem and propose an efficient distributed algorithm that generates a collision-free schedule with the least number of time slots. In contrast to others, our approach named FAST mainly contributes to both tree construction, where the former studies employ Connected 2-hop Dominating Sets, and aggregation scheduling that was previously addressed through the Competitor Sets computation. We prove that the latency of FAST under the protocol interference model is upper-bounded by 12R + Δ - 2, where R is the network radius and Δ is the maximum node degree in the communication graph of the original network. Both the theoretical analysis and simulation results show that FAST outperforms the state-of-the-art aggregation scheduling algorithms.