V-Matrix-Based Scalable Data Aggregation Scheme in WSN

Data aggregation is one of the most important functions provided by wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Among a variety of data aggregation schemes, the coding-based approaches (such as Compressive sensing (CS) and other similar programs) can significantly reduce traffic quantity by encoding the raw sensed data using weight vectors. The critical feature to design a coding-based data aggregation protocol is to construct a weight/measurement matrix for the application scenario. After that, the sink node assigns the column of the matrix, which is treated as the weight vector during the encoding process, to each sensor node respectively. However, for a dynamic scenario where the number of sensor nodes changes frequently, the existing approaches have to reconfigure the network by regenerating the measurement matrix and allocating the new weight vectors for all the existing nodes, which causes a considerable energy consumption and affects the regular monitoring tasks. To solve this problem, we propose a Vandermonde matrix-based scalable data aggregation protocol (VSDA), which preserves the advantages of coding-based schemes and addresses the issues mentioned above. In VSDA, as new nodes join into the scaled-up network, the original weight vectors owned by the original nodes do not need to regenerate the weight vectors entirely but add some new entries by itself at all. It outperforms the existing schemes by saving the energy in network scaling-up. Besides, we propose a concise hardware framework to quantify the data encoding process of VSDA, which provides a performance analysis process that is closer to practical application. The numeric tests validate the performance of VSDA compared with the existing schemes in several aspects, such as, the number of transmissions, energy consumption, and storage space showing the outperformance of VSDA scheme.