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.

In recent years, technological advances and the ever-increasing power of embedded systems have seen the emergence of so-called smart cities. In these cities, application needs are increasingly calling for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks (LS-WSN). However, the design and implementation of such networks pose several important and interesting challenges. These low-cost, low-power devices are characterized by limited computing, memory storage, communication, and battery power capabilities. Moreover, sensors are often required to cooperate in order to route the collected data to a single central node (or sink). The many-to-one communication model that governs dense and widely deployed Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) most often leads to problems of network overload and congestion. Indeed, it is easy to show that the closer a node is geographical to the sink, the more data sources it has to relay. This leads to several problems including overloading of nodes close to the sink, high loss rate in the area close to the sink, and poor distribution of power consumption that directly affects the lives of these networks. In this context, we propose a contribution to the problem of LS-WSN energy consumption. We designed a hierarchical 3-tier architecture of LS-WSNs coupled with a modeling of the activities of the different sensors in the network. This architecture that is based on clustering also includes a redeployment function to maintain the topology in case of coverage gaps. The results of the performed simulations show that our architecture maximizes the lifetime than compared solutions.

Large Scale Wireless Sensor Networks (LS-WSNs) are Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) composed of an impressive number of sensors, with inherent detection and processing capabilities, to be deployed over large areas of interest. The deployment of a very large number of diverse or similar sensors is certainly a common practice that aims to overcome frequent sensor failures and avoid any human intervention to replace them or recharge their batteries, to ensure the reliability of the network. However, in practice, the complexity of LS-WSNs pose significant challenges to ensuring quality communications in terms of symmetry of radio links and maximizing network life. In recent years, most of the proposed LS-WSN deployment techniques aim either to maximize network connectivity, increase coverage of the area of interest or, of course, extend network life. Few studies have considered the choice of a good LS-WSN deployment strategy as a solution for both connectivity and energy consumption efficiency. In this paper, we designed a LS-WSN as a tool for collecting big data generated by smart cities. The intrinsic characteristics of big data require the use of heterogeneous sensors. Furthermore, in order to build a heterogeneous LS-WSN, our scientific contributions include a model of quantifying the kinds of sensors in the network and the multi-level architecture for LS-WSN deployment, which relies on clustering for the big data collection. The results simulations show that our proposed LS-WSN architecture is better than some well known WSN protocols in the literature including Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH), E-LEACH, SEP, DEEC, EECDA, DSCHE and BEENISH.

In recent years, tremendous advances in communication technologies coupled with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to the emergence of the Big Data phenomenon. Big Data is one of the big IT challenges of the current decade. The amount of data produced is constantly increasing and makes it more and more difficult to process. Managing these masses of data requires the use of new data management systems with efficient access methods. Considered as one of the main sources of Big Data, wireless sensors used in networks offer a credible solution to the problem of Big Data management, especially its collection. Several solutions for Big Data collection based on large-scale wireless sensor networks (LS-WSN) are proposed, taking into account the nature of the applications. The hierarchical architecture is the one used for the deployment of these applications. In such an architecture, relay sensors play an important role in finding the balance of the network and maximizing its lifetime. In most LS-WSN applications, once deployed, the LS-WSN does not provide a mechanism to evaluate and improve the positions of the initially deployed relay sensors. This paper proposes, based on the growth model of physarum polycephalum and its ability to prune unnecessary links and retain only those deemed useful for food routing, a mechanism for evaluating and optimizing relay sensors in LS-WSNs. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach significantly improves the network lifetime compared to the initial deployment and that can be a useful approach for LS-WSNs dedicated to Big Data collection. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated by experimental results in terms of connectivity and network lifetime.