Robust and dynamic data aggregation in wireless sensor networks: A cross-layer approach

In-network data aggregation is an effective technique to reduce communication cost in wireless sensor networks. Recent studies have focused on two issues respectively: dynamic aggregation to handle event triggered irregular traffic and robust aggregation to handle packet losses. However, how to achieve both the objectives simultaneously, i.e. dynamic and robust aggregation is still not considered. In this paper, by making use of direct support from MAC layer, we propose a cross-layer approach to realize robust and dynamic data aggregation. A new MAC protocol, DA-MAC is delicately designed to serve such purpose. With channel contention information obtained from DA-MAC, a node can dynamically determine where and when to do aggregation. To cope with packet losses, a virtual overlay, Rings is adopted to forward one packet to multiple nodes. We have conducted numerical analysis to optimize the key parameters and implemented our design in TinyOS based sensor networks. Performance evaluation though simulations and experiments shows that our approach can handle both traffic dynamics and packet losses, with less cost than similar solutions.