Data Collection with Accuracy-Aware Congestion Control in Sensor Networks

Data collection is a fundamental and critical function of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for the cyber-physical systems (CPS) to estimate the state of the physical world. However, unstable network conditions impose significant challenges in guaranteeing the data accuracy that is essential for the reliable estimation of physical states. Without efficiently resolving congestion during data transmission in WSNs, packet loss due to congestion can significantly degrade the data quality. Various congestion control schemes have been proposed to address this issue. Most of them rely on reducing transmitted data samples to eliminate the congestion, which, however, could lead to abysmally high estimation error. In this paper, we analyze the impact of congestion control on the data accuracy and propose a Congestion-Adaptive Data Collection scheme (CADC) to efficiently resolve the congestion under the guarantee of data accuracy. CADC mitigates congestion by adaptive lossy compression while ensuring a given overall data estimation error bound in a distributed manner. Considering that for a CPS application different data items may have different priorities, we also propose a weighted CADC scheme such that the data with higher priority has less distortion. We further adapt CADC to guarantee the accuracy of specific aggregate computations. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CADC.