Energy Efficient Data Gathering in Multi-Hop Hierarchical Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This paper studies the problem of data gathering in hierarchical wireless ad hoc networks. In this scenario, a set of wireless devices generates messages which are addressed to the base station. As not all nodes can reach the base station through a direct transmission, messages are relayed by other devices in a multi-hop fashion. The authors consider data gathering without aggregation, i.e. all the generated messages are required to reach the base station - this is in contrast to the well studied problem of data gathering with aggregation, which appears to be significantly simpler. The above scheme may have poor performance in wireless networks with hierarchical architecture.