2012
Minimizing Aggregation Latency under the Physical Interference Model in Wireless
Sensor Networks
Baobing Wang and J. S. Baras
Proceedings of Third International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (IEEE SmartGridComm 2012), pp. no. 19-24, Tainan City , Taiwan, November 5-8, 2012.
Abstract
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely
recognized as a promising technology that can enhance various
aspects of today’s electric power systems, making them a vital
component of the smart grid. Ecient aggregation of data
collected by sensors is crucial for a successful WSN-based smart
grid application. Existing works on the Minimum Latency Aggregation
Scheduling (MLAS) problem in WSNs usually adopt the
protocol interference model, which is a tremendous simplification
of the physical reality faced in wireless networks. In contrast,
the more realistic physical interference model has been proved
to have the potential to increase the network capacity. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to minimize the data
aggregation latency under the physical interference model, which
jointly considers routing, power assignment and transmission
scheduling. We theoretically prove that our algorithm solves
the MLAS problem correctly and the latency is bounded by 
, where K is a model-specific constant and delta is the logarithm of the ratio between the lengths of the longest and shortest links in the network. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly reduce the aggregation latency compared to other schemes under the physical interference model. In networks where n nodes are uniformly distributed, our algorithm achieves an average latency between O(log3 n) and O(log4 n). We also discuss how to improve the energy eciency through load-balancing techniques.
