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org © 2018 IJCRT | Volume 6, Issue 2 April 2018 | ISSN: 2320-2882

DATA AGGREGATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR

NETWORKS: AN OVERVIEW
1
S.Nanthini, 2 Dr.S.Nithya Kalyani, 3Dr.S.Sudhakar
1
Assistant Professor, 2Associate Professor, 3Associate Professor
1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, 2Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
3
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
1
Sri Ramakrishna College of Engineering, 2KSR College of Engineering , 3Easa College of Engineering and
Technology, Tamil Nadu, India
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Abstract – Wireless Sensor nodes have restricted resources in terms of energy, bandwidth and computation capability. Energy efficiency is a
key design goal in sensor network. As one of techniques to achieve energy efficiency, is data aggregation. It is the process of collecting and
aggregating the useful data and it is one of the basic processing methods for saving energy. It has demonstrated its effectiveness in reducing
traffic, easing congestion and decreasing the energy consumption. Conversely very few real world applications are designed and implemented
in a running system.
IndexTerms - Data Aggregation, Wireless Sensor Network, Energy Efficiency, Bandwidth.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1. INTRODUCTION
Data Aggregation techniques have been widely used in wireless sensor networks. Several basic forms of data aggregation methods
are included here. They are i).The centre at the Nearest Source Method (CNS), where the destination aggregates the data from other nodes.
ii).The Shortest Path Trees (SPT) method, where data aggregation happens at the intermediate nodes within a shortest path tree rooted at the
sink; and iii).The greedy Incremental Trees (GIT) method, where an aggregation tree is constructed by connecting each destination sequentially
to the existing tree via a shortest path.GIT assumes a complete knowledge of global topology information.

Figure 1. Data Aggregation Model

2. DATA AGGREGATION REQUIREMENTS
2.1. Meet real-time constraints: Because the system deals with transient events, such as fast-moving targets, in the network, the sensor data
needs to be processed in a timely manner. If the processing latency is too long, a target would move out the sensing range before the detection
finishes.
2.2 Deal with a large volume of inputs: Endeavoring to accomplish reliable, timely, and quality sensing and tracking, a surveillance application
often uses multiple sensors and samples them at very high rates.
3. AGGREGATION APPROACHES
The various approaches used by sink node for data aggregation is given below:
3.1. Node Level Data Aggregation
Each sensor node has four PIR sensors, one magnetometer with two axes, and one microphone. the node performs further aggregation
after collecting confidence vectors from the sensors. it computes the averages of the sensors confidence vectors and form a single node-level
confidence vector. Because the three types of sensors form their own confidence vectors per type ,the input of the node-level sensing and
classification modules are three confidence vectors.
3.2. Group level Data Aggregation

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Tracking of a target consists of two main parts; Position Estimation and Target representation. A simple way to tackle these problems
would be to send the detection results and locations of individual nodes that detect targets to a centralized base station. Based on these received
node positions, the base is able to estimate current positions of targets, and assign and maintain unique and consistent identifies for targets by
running temporal and spatial correlation algorithms. However, such a centralized scheme is inefficient both in energy and latency.
3.3. Base level Data Aggregation
After receiving the reports from individual leader nodes, the base needs to aggregate the information further, an operation to serve
three main objectives: Flow control, Filtering, Consolidated View. The long-haul link to the remote back-end could be the bottle neck of the
system. A base is required to address the bandwidth mismatch between the sensor network output and the long-haul link capability. This is
more likely to happen when the system tracks multiple objects simultaneously. A base needs to prevent sending the duplicate reports as well
as the false alarms to the back-end. To filter out the false alarms, a system needs to correlate the spatiotemporal properties of consecutive
reports. Since the base is the only place in the network that has the complete global knowledge of a tracked target, it is at a better position than
in-network nodes to filter out the system-wide false alarms. End users is more interested in a consolidated view of the tracked targets instead
of the individual sensing reports from the sensor network. Although the group-level aggregation does provide some persistent information such
as object ID, it is not effective to keep a long trace history of a target through a sequence of hand-over operations among the leader nodes. To
improve the efficiency, a base should be used to create a consolidated view instead.
4. DATA AGGREGATION STRATEGIES
Sensor nodes are resource constrained and possess limited battery. So, to avoid the usage of more resources and battery power, data
sensed by sensor nodes must be aggregated and disseminated to other nodes. Data aggregation is the process of collecting data from different
sensor nodes and combining it together by applying aggregate functions is known as data aggregation. Aggregation Strategies are used to
enhance the network lifetime. The various aggregation strategies used in WSN are given below.
4.1. Continuous Packet Sensing and Dissemination (CPSD)
Since CPSD does not perform actual aggregation, it is also called as zero aggregation schemes. In this method, each node senses the
data at fixed sensing intervals and the node immediately transmitting the received data to cluster head without storing in the buffer. CPSD is
widely used in the situation where the fresh messages are required and the reception of data is required very urgent and any delay in receiving
the data may lead to failure or performance degradation of the system. CPSD requires adequate energy to keep battery without dry.
4.2. Continuous Packet Collection and Dissemination (CPCD)
In CPCD, each node uses buffer to store the collected and sensed data. Buffer is a hardware unit and the storage area is allocated by
the software used in sensor node. Each node has to wait until the buffer gets filled by data. The sensor node keeps on sensing data and tries to
fill the buffer. Once the buffer is filled, the sensor node will start to disseminate data to other nodes. In CPCD, each data dissemination takes
long interval since every node has to wait till the buffer is filled up. This scheme highly reduces network overhead and consumption of power.
4.3. Programmed Packet Collection and Dissemination (PPCD)
In PPCD, each sensor node senses the environment and collects data to store in the buffer. The sensor node will not disseminate the
data immediately to other nodes. Instead, the node sets a dissemination time interval and waits until the time expires. If the dissemination
interval time expires, then the sensor node will start to disseminate the buffered data to other nodes. If buffer overflow occurs before the
dissemination interval, then the old packet will be replaced by the newly arrived data. So, increasing the dissemination time will highly reduce
the regularity of packet transmission on the network. This scheme can be used in the situation where the data to be transmitted is not a critical
case.
4.4. Programmed Packet Aggregation and Dissemination (PPAD)
In this scheme, each node senses the data and apply the required aggregate functions such as AVG,MIN, and MAX,STDDEV etc. on
the sensed data. Each sensor node stores only the aggregated data rather than storing the sensed data. Finally, the buffer contains only one
aggregated data and thereby saving memory.
5. DATA AGGREGATION ALGORITHMS
The objective of the data aggregation problem is to transmit the sensed data from each sensor node to BS. The goal of algorithms
which implement data aggregation is to maximize the number of rounds of communication before the nodes die and the network become
inoperable. This means minimum energy should be consumed and the transmission should occur with minimum delays, which are conflicting

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requirements. Hence, the energy x delay metric is used to compare algorithms, since this metric measures speedy and energy efficient data
aggregation. A few algorithms that implement data aggregation are discussed in this section.
5.1. Direct Transmission
All sensor nodes transmit their data directly to the BS. This is extremely expensive in terms of energy consumed, since the BS may
be very far away from some nodes. Also node must take turns while transmitting to the BS to avoid collision, so the media access delay is also
large. Hence this scheme performs poorly with respect to the energy x delay metric.
5.2. Power Efficient Gathering For Sensor Information Systems
PEGASIS is a data aggregation protocol based on the assumption that all sensor nodes know the location of every other node, that is,
the topology information is available to all nodes. Also any node has the required transmission range to reach the BS in one hop, when it is
selected as a leader.
The Goals of PEGASIS are
 Minimize the distance over which each node transmits
 Minimize the broadcasting overhead
 Minimize the number of messages that need to be sent to the BS
 Distribute the energy consumption equally across all nodes
5.3. Binary Scheme
This is also a chain-based scheme like PEGASIS, which classifies nodes into different levels. All nodes which receive messages at
one level rise to the next. The number of nodes is halved from one level to the next. This scheme is possible when nodes communicating using
CDMA, so that transmission of each level can take place simultaneously.
5.4. Chain-Based Three-Level Scheme
For non-CDMA sensor nodes, a binary scheme is not applicable. The chain based three level scheme addresses this situation, where
again a chain is constructed as in PEGASIS. The chain is divided into a number of groups to space out simultaneous transmission in order to
minimize interference. Within a group, nodes transmit one at a time. One node out of each group aggregates data from all group members and
rises to the next level. The index of this leader node is decided a priori. In the second level, all nodes are divided into two groups, and the third
level consists of a message exchange between one node from each group of the second level. Finally, the leader transmits a single message to
the BS.
5.5. Aggregated Packet Transmission (APT)
With aggregated packet transmission, nodes transmit a batch of packets in a single cycle. The benefit of this scheme is it provides
shorter delay, throughput and energy efficiency tends to high.
6. PERFORMANCE MEASURE OF DATA AGGREGATION
Data aggregation consists of very important performance measures and the performance measures are highly dependent on the desired
application.
Energy Efficiency: Every sensor nodes have spent some amount of energy while data gathering. Data aggregation scheme is highly energy
efficient, while it maximizes the functionality of network.
Network Lifetime: Network lifetime is the time duration from the initial deployment to the instant when the network is considered
nonfunctional.
Latency: It is defined as the data evaluation time delay experiences by the system, means the data are send by sensor nodes and the delivered
data to be received by the base station. Normally delay involves during data transmission.
Communication Overhead: It is defined as the total numbers of packets are to be transferred or transmitted from one node to another is known
as the communication overhead. It includes the overhead of routing process, routing table and packet preparation in a sensor node.
Data Accuracy: It is mainly used to evaluate the total number of reading (data) received at the base station to the total number of data generated.
7. IMPACT OF DATA AGGREGATION
In this section we discussed the following factors will affect the performance of data aggregation in wireless sensor network, such as
saving energy and delay, fault-tolerance, security by surveying various protocols.

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8. SECURITY ISSUES IN DATA AGGREGATION
Data aggregation exploits the sensed data from the sensors to the gateway node. It plays a vital role in WSN since the aggregation
scheme followed and it involve reducing the power consumed during the data transmission between the sensor nodes. There are four important
security requirements; Confidentiality, integrity, Authentication, Availability have to be consummated.
Confidentiality: The basic security issues is data confidentiality or privacy, it protect the sensitive transmitted data from passive attacks.
Data integrity: Data integrity prevents the compromised source node or aggregator nodes from considerably altering the final aggregation
value. Authentication: Sensor requires authentication to find the malicious packets. To provide secure authentication sender and receiver
sharing a secret key to compute the message authentication code for transmitted data.
Availability: Availability is more important than regular sensor nodes. It assures the survivability of network services against DOS (Denial-
Of-Service) attacks. Wireless Sensor Network is deploying with high node redundancy to tolerate such availability losses.
9. CONCLUSION
In this paper we present the overview of data aggregation. Wireless sensor network is consisting of large number of sensor node and
the sensor nodes are energy constraint. So, the life time of sensor nodes are limited. Various numbers of approaches and techniques are used
to improve the life time of sensor nodes, in this paper we discuss the data aggregation is one of the most suitable techniques for improving the
network life time. And also we discussed a security issue which is encountered in wireless sensor networks.

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