Abstract

The Smart City contexts and the adoption of Industry 4.0 are being upgraded with the latest technologies throughout all systems. New data are continuously collected in huge amounts; therefore, an efficient data aggregation scheduling scheme is highly demanded. This paper addresses the minimum time aggregation scheduling problem in duty-cycled sensor networks. Existing solutions schedule the sensory data through predefined routing structures, which limit the utilization of diverse active time slots of sensors. We propose a period-driven pipeline scheduling approach, namely PDA, that simultaneously grows the aggregation tree and assigns a transmission schedule for each node being added to the tree. Particularly, this process is performed in a top-down manner. In each iteration, corresponding to a time slot, PDA uses a multi-level ranking strategy to schedule several <sender, receiver> pairs, so that in a working period ahead, the possibility to pipeline as many transmissions as possible is high. Intensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme notably works better than the best known recent algorithms by having up to 35 percent shorter aggregation time, as well as having a significantly improved network throughput and time utilization.