Lossless In-Network Processing and Its Routing Design in Wireless Sensor Networks

Peng Guo, Xuefeng Liu, Jiannong Cao, Shaojie Tang

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In many domain-specific monitoring applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), such as structural health monitoring, volcano tomography, and machine diagnosis, the raw data in WSNs are required to be losslessly gathered to the sink, where a specialized centralized algorithm is then executed to extract some global features or model parameters. To reduce the large raw data transmission, in-network processing is usually employed. However, different from most existing in-network processing works that pre-assume some common computation/aggregation functions, in-network processing of a given centralized algorithm requires exact partitioning of the algorithm first and then appropriately assigning the partitioned computations into WSNs. We call this lossless in-network processing, which has not been studied much. Lossless in-network processing raises two questions: 1) what pattern should a centralized algorithm be partitioned into so that the partitioned computations can be flexibly assigned into a WSN with arbitrary topology? and 2) for each partition pattern, how should efficient routing for the resource-limited sensor nodes be designed? These two questions can be referred to as a topology-constrained computation partition problem and a computation-constrained routing design problem, respectively. In this paper, we first introduce some general patterns on the topology-constrained computation partition. Then, with the computation constraints in the patterns, we present a series of novel routing schemes customized for different cases of computation results. The work in this paper can also serve as a guideline for distributed computing of big data, where the data spreads in a large network.

Original languageEnglish
Article number7981355
Pages (from-to)6528-6542
Number of pages15
JournalIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Volume16
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2017

Keywords

  • in-network processing
  • matrix computation
  • routing scheme
  • Wireless sensor network (WSN)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Applied Mathematics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Lossless In-Network Processing and Its Routing Design in Wireless Sensor Networks'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this