Layered data aggregation in cell-phone based wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The ubiquitous use of mobile phones motivates the idea of ‘participatory sensing’ with a cell-phone based sensor network. In our work, we consider a layered architecture for a query-based urban monitoring application using mobile phones. The key contribution of the paper is a Data-Aware Layered Waiting (DA-LW) time aggregation protocol in cell-phone based wireless sensor networks. To motivate the DA-LW protocol, we first develop a Cluster-Head (CH) based data aggregation protocol. The performance of the proposed protocols is evaluated in terms of energy, delay and resolution, which are primarily important for the monitoring application. Simulation results demonstrate the overall superiority in performance of the Data-Aware Layered Waiting algorithm over the Cluster-Head based algorithm.