A time efficient aggregation convergecast scheduling algorithm for wireless sensor networks

We investigated the aggregation convergecast scheduling problem in wireless sensor networks. In order to reduce the time needed for data collection through aggregation convergecast, we propose a scheduling algorithm based on an aggregation tree which enables a small delay lower bound and a time slot allocation method which uses the time slots efficiently. To achieve a small delay lower bound, we take the sum of the receiver’s depth and child number as the cost of the transmission links and then construct an aggregation tree gradually by adding to it a link with the minimum cost iteration by iteration. To use the time slots efficiently, we use a neighbor degree ranking algorithm together with a supplementary scheduling algorithm to allocate time slot for the sensor nodes. Experiments show that the proposed scheduling algorithm outperforms other work in most cases by reducing the number of time slots needed for data collection by more than 10 %, which indicates the feasibility of our approach for data collection in wireless sensor networks.