Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation in Low-Power Wireless Networks With Sensors of Discrete Transmission Ranges: A Mathematical Framework for Network Design

The advancements in sensor technology and the evolution of new generation technologies such as the Internet of Things have led to extensive deployment of low-power wireless sensor networks for various surveillance and monitoring applications. The volume and velocity of the data generated by a large number of sensors and monitors used in such applications are huge. The harnessing of such Big Data is critical to the real-time control of underlying real-world processes. Future generation networks favor the deployment of sensors with different discrete transmission ranges. Such multiple transmission ranges introduce different connectivity constraints in the network. Advanced strategies are under investigation for designing energy-efficient data aggregation schemes in such connectivity-constrained networks. To aid such works, we introduce a mathematical framework that captures the salient features of low-power networks with sensors of multiple transmission ranges. The proposed framework can serve as a baseline platform to investigate different networking problems in such systems. Further, we consider a cluster-based multihop network with fixed intra-cluster and inter-cluster transmission ranges and address the problem of designing an optimal network configuration for minimizing the data transmission in the network. We model the problem as an integer linear program, which can be applied only to networks of small sizes because of the hardness of the problem. To address the problem in large-scale networks, we design a polynomial-time approximation method using the proposed mathematical framework. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated under compression schemes based on compressive sensing.