  This paper describes EZ-AG, a structure-free protocol for duplicate
insensitive data aggregation in MANETs. The key idea in EZ-AG is to introduce a
token that performs a self-repelling random walk in the network and aggregates
information from nodes when they are visited for the first time. A
self-repelling random walk of a token on a graph is one in which at each step,
the token moves to a neighbor that has been visited least often. While
self-repelling random walks visit all nodes in the network much faster than
plain random walks, they tend to slow down when most of the nodes are already
visited. In this paper, we show that a single step push phase at each node can
significantly speed up the aggregation and eliminate this slow down. By doing
so, EZ-AG achieves aggregation in only O(N) time and messages. In terms of
overhead, EZ-AG outperforms existing structure-free data aggregation by a
factor of at least log(N) and achieves the lower bound for aggregation message
overhead. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of EZ-AG using ns-3
simulations in networks ranging from 100 to 4000 nodes under different mobility
models and node speeds. We also describe a hierarchical extension for EZ-AG
that can produce multi-resolution aggregates at each node using only O(NlogN)
messages, which is a poly-logarithmic factor improvement over existing
techniques.
