Concurrent data collection trees for IoT applications

Internet of Things (IoT) systems comprise massive volumes of smart devices. Through exchanges of information, smart objects are capable of reasoning and generate higher level of intelligence. The effectiveness of data collection processes is a key factor to the success of IoT systems as it can seriously affect the freshness of the captured data. Efficient data collection processes have been well studied on sensory systems with static topologies and single data extraction point. Smart devices in IoT systems are often shared by different parties; therefore, concurrent data collection processes are always expected. Such a unique characteristic of IoT systems has imposed new challenges to the designs of efficient data collection processes. In this paper, concurrent data collection trees specifically designed for IoT applications are proposed. It is shown that, comparing with an existing single-user data collection structure, systems with the proposed tree structures can significantly shorten their concurrent data collection processes.