Data aggregation protocols for WSN and IoT applications – A comprehensive survey

Data aggregation involves the integration of correlated data generated by various wireless sensors and devices in WSN and IoT networks, in order to arrive at meaningful interpretation of the data sensed. It also serves as an efficient mechanism to optimize the resources like node energy, communication bandwidth and computation time, in WSN and IoT networks. The paper presents a brief overview of basic concepts related to WSN & IoT networks, data aggregation, and various optimization parameters used by the data aggregation protocols. A major contribution of the paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of various data aggregation protocols developed to address issues related to network topology, interference, fault-tolerance, mobility and security in WSN and IoT networks. Due to resource constraints, WSN and IoT networks are besieged with several competing requirements like latency, energy efficiency, data accuracy, data freshness, temporal correctness etc. The paper presents an in-depth discussion on these requirements, and the tradeoff strategies to be followed by data aggregation approaches to optimize these requirements. The paper highlights some of the gap areas in existing data aggregation approaches and suggests research solutions to amicably plug these gaps.