Approximate Holistic Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Holistic aggregation results are important for users to obtain summary information from Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Holistic aggregation requires all the sensory data to be sent to the sink, which costs a huge amount of energy. Fortunately, in most applications, approximate results are acceptable. We study the approximated holistic aggregation algorithms based on uniform sampling. In this paper, four holistic aggregation operations are investigated. The mathematical methods to construct their estimators and determine the optional sample size are proposed, and the correctness of these methods is proved. Four corresponding distributed holistic algorithms are presented. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the algorithms have high performance.