Data collection is an important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT). Current routing and addressing operations in WSNs are based on IP addresses, while data collection and data queries are normally information-centric. The current IP-based approach incurs significant management overheads and is inefficient for semantic data collection and queries. To address the above issue, this paper proposes a semantic data collection tree (sDCT) construction scheme to build up a semantic data collection tree for wireless sensor networks. The semantic tree is rooted at the edge/sink and supports data collection tasks, queries, and configurations efficiently. We implement the sDCT in Contiki and evaluate the performance of the sDCT in comparison with the state-of-the-art scheme, 6LoWPAN/RPL and L2RMR, using telosb sensors under various scenarios. The obtained results show that the sDCT achieves a significant improvement in terms of the energy efficiency and the packet transmissions required for data collection or a query task compared to 6LoWPAN/RPL and L2RMR.
Keywords: IoT service function chains; edge computing; fog computing; high availability; internet of things; network function virtualization.