Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are data centric networks to which data aggregation is a central mechanism. Nodes in such networks are known to be of low complexity and highly constrained in energy. This requires novel distributed algorithms to data aggregation, where accuracy, complexity and energy need to be optimized in the aggregation of the raw data as well as the communication process of the aggregated data. To this end, we propose in this work a distributed data aggregation scheme based on an adaptive Auto-Regression Moving Average (ARMA) model estimation using a moving window technique and running over suitable communications protocols. In our approach, we balance the complexity of the algorithm and the accuracy of the model so as to facilitate the implementation. Subsequent analysis shows that an aggregation efficiency up to 60% can be achieved with a very fine accuracy of 0.03 degree. And simulation results confirm that this distributed algorithm provides significant energy savings (over 80%) for mass data collection applications.