A study on data aggregation and reliability in managing wireless sensor networks

Using data aggregation to reduce power consumption is a well studied area. In this paper we show a new result: data aggregation can also be used to increase reliability. In scenarios where status is being collected from every node (e.g. network management), one measure of reliability is the completeness (nodes included). Using some of the power savings from aggregation to increase the retransmission limit for aggregated data gives significant improvements in completeness. The contribution of this paper is in providing a detailed comparison of the completeness and energy efficiency for aggregated and non-aggregated data. Results, derived by numerical analysis and simulation, show that with data aggregation and increased retransmission limits, reliability can be substantially improved, while still saving power. These results are applicable to designing network management protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks, as well as for other scenarios where high completeness is required for network-wide data collection.