Scalable Data Collection in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

Applications of sensor networks often necessitate fine-grained data collection, requiring dense deployment of sensors, with associated high data rates. Such deployment and application scenarios impose significant constraints on aggregate network data rate, resource utilization, and robustness. Effective protocols for supporting such data transfers are critical for dense sensing applications. These protocols often rely on spatio-temporal correlations in sensor data to achieve in-network data compression. The message complexity of these schemes is generally lower bounded by n, for a network with n sensors, since correlation is not collocated with sensing.