Big Data Collection in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Data collection is one of the main operations performed in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Even if several interesting approaches on data collection have been proposed during the last decade, it remains a research focus in full swing with a number of important challenges. Indeed, the continuous reduction in sensor size and cost, the variety of sensors available on the market, and the tremendous advances in wireless communication technology have potentially broadened the impact of WSNs. The range of application of WSNs now extends from health to the military field through home automation, environmental monitoring and tracking, as well as other areas of human activity. Moreover, the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in an important amount of heterogeneous data that are produced at an exponential rate. Furthermore, these data are of interest to both industry and in research. This fact makes their collection and analysis imperative for many purposes. In view of the characteristics of these data, we believe that very large-scale and heterogeneous WSNs can be very useful for collecting and processing these Big Data. However, the scaling up of WSNs presents several challenges that are of interest in both network architecture to be proposed, and the design of data-routing protocols. This paper reviews the background and state of the art of Big Data collection in Large-Scale WSNs (LS-WSNs), compares and discusses on challenges of Big Data collection in LS-WSNs, and proposes possible directions for the future.