A Data Aggregation Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks for Structure Monitoring

Data aggregation can reduce the communication cost, thereby extending the lifetime of sensor networks. One key issue in structure monitoring is data aggregation. The sensors are typically sampled at high frequencies, producing large amounts of data; limited network resources make acquiring and processing this data quite challenging. In this paper, we propose an novel data aggregation scheme in WSNs for structure monitoring. In scheme, the interesting nodes can autonomously discover each other in a distributed fashion and form an ad hoc aggregation structure that can be used to compute cumulants and moments, or other statistical summaries. Simulation results show that the data size is reduced by a factor of 20 to 30 depending on the scheme in the aggregation.