Minimizing Latency for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks: An Algorithm Approach

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in underwater sensor networks, the problem of reporting data to the sink with minimum latency has been widely discussed in many research works. Many studies address using data aggregation to report the same type of data to the sink without data collision in a short period of time. However, due to the rapid development of sensor technology in recent years, a sensor is allowed to have multiple sensing capabilities, that is, it can generate and collect different types of data. Because different types of data have different meanings and required aggregation functions, only the data that belong to the same type are allowed to be aggregated. In addition, due to the interference of the environment or noise, the links in the WSNs are often not bidirectional. This motivates us to study the problem of using minimum latency scheduling to aggregate and report data to the sink without data collision in multiple-data-type WSNs having unidirectional links, which is shown to be NP-hard in the article. The Relative-Collision-Graph-Based Scheduling Algorithm (RCGBSA) is proposed accordingly. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the RCGBSA.