Data Gathering Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor network applications are often data centric and involve collecting data from a set of sensor nodes to be delivered to various consumers. Typically, nodes in a sensor network are resource-constrained, and hence the algorithms operating in these networks must be efficient. There may be several algorithms available implementing the same service, and efficient considerations may require a sensor application to choose the best suited algorithm. In this paper, the authors present a systematic evaluation of a set of algorithms implementing the data gathering service. They propose a modular infrastructure for implementing such algorithms in TOSSIM with separate configurable modules for various tasks such as interest propagation, data propagation, aggregation, and path maintenance.