Summary

Sensor networks, a novel paradigm in distributed wireless communication technology, have been proposed for various applications including military surveillance and environmental monitoring. Such systems suffer bandwidth, energy, and throughput constraints that limit the quantity of information transferred from end-to-end. Mechanisms to perform data centric aggregation utilizing application specific knowledge provide a means to augmenting throughput, but have limitations due to their lack of adaptation and reliance on application specific decisions. We, therefore, propose three novel Application Independent data aggregation schemes:Signal Strength (aggregator with high signal strength), Fixed(pre-defined aggregators), Fly (adaptive) to perform application independent data aggregation in a time sensitive manner. Our work isolates aggregation decisions into a module that resides between the network and the data link layer and does not require any modifications to the currently existing MAC and network layer protocols. We take advantage of queuing delay and the broadcast nature of wireless communication to concatenate network units into an aggregate using a novel adaptive feedback scheme to schedule the delivery of this aggregate to the MAC layer for transmission. In our evaluation we show that bandwidth utilization has increased by as much as 80 % , packet loss has bee